The Meaning Of Paul For To Day

1 27 690

THE MEANING OF
PAUL FOR TO-DAY

THE
PAUL FOR

BY

C. HAROLD DODD, M.A.

YATJCS PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK AND EXXGXSXC

AT MANSFIELD COLLEGE. OXFORD

NEW G D H YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

PARENTIBUS
PRIMITIAS

PREFACE

** THESE that have turned the world upside down are come
hither also." So the people of ancient Saionica judged
two men who came proclaiming the Christian Way to a
pagan society. By happy fortune, one of the two revo-
lutionaries has survived in his writings, and we are in a
position to learn at first-hand how Paul of Tarsus, artisan,
scholar, traveller, leader of men, carried out into that
imperial world die gospel that had transformed his own
life, interpreting it in daring and vivid terms to the mind
of his time. A gospel so deeply personal and so widely
human can survive the intellectual vicissitudes of centuries,
and bear re-interpretation for a new age without losing its
vital force.

In this little book I have made some attempt to suggest
the place of Paul in the history of religion ; but I have
been more particularly concerned to bring out what I
conceive to be the permanent significance of the apostle's
thought, in modern terms, and in relation to the general
interests and problems which occupy the mind of our
generation. I find in Paul a religious philosophy of life
orientated throughout to the idea of a society or common-
wealth of God. Such a philosophy finds ready contact
with the dominant concerns of our own day,

The basis of this study is the Pauline epistles. There
is now a very general agreement among students that in
the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, in both epistles to
the Corinthians, and in those to the Galatians, Romans,

8 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Philippians, we possess
authentic letters from the hand of the great missionary
himself. The order in which they are here named is
probably the order of their composition. The remaining
five epistles (for no one now supposes that Paul wrote
** Hebrews ") are still in dispute. Without entering into
the dispute here, I may state my belief that the balance
of probability is on the side of the genuineness of II Thes-
salonians and of Ephesians. The latter, however, was
probably not written to Ephesus, or at least not exclusively
to Ephesus. It may have been some kind of circular
letter, written, as we must suppose, almost simultaneously
with Colossians. Even if it could be shown not to be
from the hand of Paul, it would still remain an important
statement of the Pauline philosophy of life in its most
developed form. Upon these ten letters I have based my
exposition. On the other hand, I cannot persuade myself
that the Epistles to Timothy and Titus are, at any rate
in their present form, authentic letters of Paul, though
they no foubt contain Pauline material I have not used
them as sources for Paul's thought. The Acts of the
Apostles., which contain a valuable outline of the Apostle's
missionary journeys from the pen of one of his companions,
I nave treated as only a secondary authority where his
'nner life and thought are concerned.

I have given quotations from the epistles in an English
form which represents my own attempt to reproduce,
sometimes by way of paraphrase rather than literal trans-
lation, the precise meaning of the original. They may be
compared with any other version that may be accessible.
For those who do not read Greek a comparison of a number
of different versions is perhaps the next best thing.

I may perhaps be permitted a word upon one aspect
of the subject which is at the moment a matter of con-
troversy. The view here taken of the religion from which

PREFACE 9

Paul reacted is very different from the picture of first-
century Pharisaism which has recently been set befox'e
us by Dr. Abrahams and Dr. C. G. Montefiore. I would
observe that Paul himself leaves us in no doubt as to the
general effect of the type of Judaism he once professed j
and whether or not this type of Judaism was the orthodox
Pharisaism of the time, matters little for our present pur-
pose. It is a phase of religion which recurs in many periods,
and not only within Judaism. But Paul unequivocally
describes himself in his pre-Christian days as a Pharisee.
Moreover, we have in the gospels an independent descrip-
tion of Pharisaic religion from a different point of view ;
and it appears to me that on this matter the gospels and
the Pauline epistles explain and corroborate one another.
The Jewish scholars I have mentioned have selected from
the corpus of Rabbinic writings a set of sayings which give
a very attractive picture of Judaism under the Law, and
their method of selection seems more critical and dis-
criminating than that pursued by scholars of a former
generation Weber, Schiirer, Edersheim who out of the
same corpus produced a far less attractive picture. In
any case, however, the evidence for the first century seems
to be extracted with difficulty and some uncertainty from
a mass of material committed to writing not earlier than
the close of the second century. The gospels and the
Pauline epistles, on the other hand, are contemporary
evidence that in the first century a very strict and exclusive
kind of legal puritanism did overshadow the religious life
of a group of pious Jews ; that this group was for the time
being dominant ; and that this group, if not identical with
the Pharisees, was at least included in that sect, and largely
determined its main religious tendency. Both the gospels
and the Pauline epistles give us hints of a more humane
and spiritual tendency within Judaism and even within
Pharisaism ; and this tendency may be represented by

io THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

the Rabbinic teaching to which Dr. Abrahams and Dr
Montefiore have introduced us. Paul, if Luke has reported
him correctly, belonged to "the strictest sect"

To acknowledge my indebtedness to all books and
teachers without whose help this little book could never
have come into existence would be an endless task ; nor
is it part of my purpose to give a bibliography. But I
cannot refrain from commending to others two books
from which I learnt very much about Paul : Heinrich
Weinel's S. Paul: the Man and his Work (E.T. pub.
Williams & Norgate 1906), and Adolf Deissmann's S. Paul:
a Study in Social and Religious History (E.T. pub. Hodder
& Stoughton 1912). I could wish that any whom
this book may lead to further study of the apostle would
read those two books. But above all, let them read the
letters themselves not lections from the letters, but each
letter as a unit in itself -either in the original or in a good
modern translation such as that of Professor Moffatt.

I am grateful to my colleague Dr. Buchanan Gray,
to the Rev. John R. Coates, and to the Editor of this series
for suggestions and advice while the book was in proof.

C.H.D.

MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD,

July 17, 1920.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE . . . . 7

CHAPTER

I. FROM JESUS TO PAUL . , . J 3

II. A CITIZEN OF NO MEAN CITY . . l<)

III. THE HOPE OF THE WORLD . . -3

IV. THE QUEST OF THE DIVINE COMMONWEALTH . 42

V. THE ANCIENT WRONG.' . * 54

VI. THE TYRANNY OF AN IDEA . .66

VII. THE SON OF GOD . . . .84

VIII. THE DECISIVE. BATTLE . 94

IX. EMANCIPATION . . . . 106

X. THE LORD THE SPIRIT . . . 123

XI. THE DIVINE COMMONWEALTH DISCOVERED^ . 138

XII. THE LIFE OF THE DIVINE COMMONWEALTH . 146

APPENDIX

A LETTER FROM PAUL THE MISSIONARY TO

THE SOCIETY OF CHRISTIANS IN ROME . l6o

INDEX OF REFERENCES TO THE PAULINE

EPISTLES . . . .169

44 ... But the big courage is the cold-blooded kind, the kind
that never lets go even when you're feeling empty inside, and
your blood's thin, and there's no kind of fun or profit to be had,
and the trouble's not over in an hour or two but lasts for months
and years. One of the men here was speaking about that kind,
and he called it ' Fortitude.' I reckon fortitude's the biggest
thing a man can have just to go on enduring when there's no
guts or heart left in you. Billy had it when he trekked solitary
from Garungoze to the Limpopo with fever and a broken arm
just to show the Portu gooses that he wouldn't be downed by
them. But the head man at the job was the Apostle Paul ..."

** Peter Pienaar " in John Buckayfs MR. STANDFAST.

The Meaning of Paul for
To-day

CHAPTER I
FROM JESUS TO PAUL

THE story of the Gospels is an unfinished drama. Its
historic interest is pivoted upon the conflict between the new
liberating message of the Kingdom and the religious system
represented by the Pharisees. In the narrative of Mark
we watch the forces gather for the inevitable clash. Chal-
lenged on one issue after another with a challenge not
forced upon a reluctant situation but growing out of the
nature of irreconcilable ideals the supporters of the old
order gradually rally for a battle royal on the whole front
of man's religious destiny. More and more it becomes
clear that no accommodation is possible. There is a clear
issue : on the one hand the Way of the Nazarene, with His
startling assertions and denials ; on the other hand all that
the piety of the time prized as the essentials of a revealed
religion. The plot thickens, until in the dim morning light
of the fatal Passover the antagonists stand face to face a
nation on one side, the rejected Prophet on the other. The
clash comes, and when the earthquake and the eclipse are
past, the Established Order remains supreme. The gospel

13

i 4 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

of emancipation has been added to the limbo of shattered
illusions, and Pharisaism is triumphant.

That is the crisis of the movement. The situation
holds all the elements of real tragedy : a conflict of passionate
human interests in which ancient good, become uncouth,
overcomes the better that might be, and the stirrings of the
human spirit after freedom are baffled by historic necessity.
But it is evident that the plot is not finished. The whole
development has pointed forward, to this situation cer-
tainly, but not to this as conclusion. And indeed the gospels
themselves obscure the tragedy in a sudden blaze of super-
natural light. In the intoxicating joy of Easter morning
the defeat is forgotten, and the divine Victor holds the
stage. But the faith of the Resurrection is so far a matter of
personal religious experience : it is not, as yet, history. As
a denouement of the tangled plot it is scarcely even relevant.
It is the supreme appearance of the Deus ex machina. The
risen Christ is Victor indeed over Death ; but He is not
Victor over the Pharisees. For all the raptures of the
disciples, the great system of Pharisaic Judaism stands, as
imposing, as self-sufficient, as ever. The tragic conflict
is not yet resolved.

Various hands have essayed the construction of a con-
vincing Last Act. For the " realist " school the illusion
of the Resurrection is but the deepest note in a final and
irredeemable catastrophe. The President of the Immortals
has finished His sport with the Nazarene. This is, how-
ever, to abandon the data of the plot ; for the drama is
cast not for disaster but for j oy For the school of romantic
melodrama there must be a vindication of poetic justice ;
and the Risen Christ takes His sword of vengeance and sees
His desire upon His enemies. It matters here little whether
the mse en scene is a Michelangelesque Last Day, or
whether^ the venue being removed to solid earth, Christ is
shown triumphing over die ruins of Jerusalem in the fatal

FROM JESUS TO PAUL 15

year of Titus's victory.* Such a denouement is a denial of
the central motive of the drama. The character of the
Hero must be consistent with itself ; and the triumph of
a vengeful Messiah is not the triumph of the Victim of
Calvary. It is therefore no resolution of the tragic
knot.

For a convincing denouement the Hero of the drama
the Speaker of the Sermon on the Mount, the Prisoner of
the Sanhedrin, the Bearer of the curse of the Law on
Golgotha, must emerge, He and no other, as the con-
queror, the conqueror by His own weapons and by no other,
of that unchanged Pharisaism, so noble in its stuff, so
pernicious in the final issue of its spirit, which had by an
inner necessity of its being destroyed Him. In His victory
the Cross must have its indispensable part, and the
Resurrection must be shown to be not only an imaginative
truth of the supernal world, where the baffled spirit takes
refuge from intractable facts, but an active force in real
life. Then, and not till then, shall we rest satisfied that
the whole dramatic situation has been adequately dealt with
and the tragic conflict reconciled.

This is the denouement which History has written.
The beginning of it can be told in a few words : " A
Hebrew of Hebrews, in regard to the Law a Pharisee . . .
I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus ... I am crucified with
Christ, and yet I am alive not I, but Christ is alive in
me." 3 Was revenge ever more complete ? Imagine this
man (as we may well imagine him, for he was there in spirit
at least) among those fanatical Jews who would not enter
Pilate's hall "lest they should be defiled," yet stood without
clamouring for the death of the Carpenter- Prophet who had
dared affront the majesty of their hoary Law. And then

* Forsyth, Christian Ethic of War, p. 87 : " Did Christ not
summon then, the legions it did not suit Him to ask for to avert
the Cross ? " a Phil. Hi. 5-H, Gal ; ii. 19-20.

1 6 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

see him yielding utterly to the spell of the Cross upon
which he or his like had fastened the Rejected. That
is real conquest. It is the method of the Christian
Revolution.

Here we get the clue to the unity of the New Testament.
The Epistles are often opposed to the Gospels as though
they contained " rival philosophies." If in the story of the
Prodigal Son we have the heart of Christ's message, where,
it is asked, is this message to be found amid the maze of
speculation about Law, Sin, and Sacrifice which fills the
pages of the Epistles ? Those who ask that question have
failed to notice that the real problem of that immortal tale
is the churlish elder brother. " He was angry and would
not go in " ; and in spite of the father's pleadings, there
he is left when the tale ends. Good reason for this : when
Jesus told the tale the elder brothers were fiercely refusing
His invitations to renew fellowship with those despised
prodigals whom Jesus ** came to seek and to save." The
epistles of Paul show us the elder brother broken down by
the Father's love and leaving home and its secure delights
to go into far countries and seek out those brothers who still
lingered among the swine and the husks. If the language
in which he tells us how it came about is tortuous and difficult,
we may find in it a sign of the contortions of the spirit which
had to be straightened out before the elder brother could
put away his pride and prejudice and learn his Father's
mind.

In all this we are thinking of Paul not as an individual
merely, but as the one mind through which we can read
from the inside what Christ's victorious assault on Phari-
saism meant. Paul's letters reflect his experience ; and
his experience was an epitome of the revolution which Christ
wrought in religion. There was in Jewish religion a rich
spiritual treasure, gathered through centuries of a history
as ?tiange as any this world can show. But the treasure

FROM JESUS TO PAUL 17

was not available for mankind, and the process which
denied it to the world made it useless or worse to its possessors.
" You Pharisees," said Jesus, " have taken away the key of
knowledge ; you have not entered in yourselves, and you hin-
dered those who were trying to enter in." The task which
He set Himself was not simply to teach new truth and leave
it at that. He embraced the destiny of Messiahship. That
meant a harder task. It meant gathering up the threads
of the past and weaving them into the new design. He
came, "not to destroy, but to fulfil" In particular
it meant that He undertook the task of liberating the
spiritual treasure of Israel's faith for humanity. Because
He was faithful to that destiny He died on a Roman Across. 3
In Paul and in the work of his mission we see the task
being accomplished. In Paul the devout passion for con-
duct which distinguished the Jewish religion is seen liberated,
enlightened, made spiritual and personal, by what Paul
found in Christ; and then impressed upon the life and
thought of the wide world in terms which belong to that
strangely composite state of mind where the mystical East
met tne Roman West through the humanizing medium of
the great Hellenic tradition.

Because of this Paul is a great figure in the history of
religion. Yet his thought has more than a merely historic
interest. Religion is one of the determining factors in
all history. Too often its organization becomes, as it had
become in the rime of Christ, an obstacle to the free pro-
gress of man. For this reason the reformer and the revolu-
tionary are very ready to lose patience with religion and set
it aside. Yet the dynamic of religion remains, for good or
ill, the strongest of all human motives. Part of the
work of Christ was that He redeemed religion itself for
the saving; of men. It is this side of His work which

3 On this matter see J. R. Coates, The Christ of Revolution,
in this series.

2

i8 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

so powerfully affected Paul that he remains the classic
exponent of the idea of freedom and universality in religion.
While religion remains the problem, the peril, but also the
one hope of human progress, his work has a contem-
porary interest.

CHAPTER II
A CITIZEN OF NO MEAN CITY

IN the first century of our era Western civilization was
coterminous with the Roman Empire. Augustus had set
forward with some differences and with greater success the
far-reaching policy of his brilliant uncle. He put an end
to the evil political system, or want of system, which had
made the Roman Republic in its later phases a menace to
civilization. The constitution which he established worked
at least in the direction of public order and peace. A
tendency set in to make the provinces co-operative parts of a
great commonwealth instead of the plunder of a narrow
circle of aristocratic families.

Throughout the eastern provinces of the Empire Rome
was the inheritor, and in a great measure the upholder, of
an earlier system. From the time of Alexander the Great
the countries bordering the Levant had come strongly
within the circle of Greek civilization. The Greek lan-
guage was current in most of the towns, even if native
languages subsisted alongside them, as they did more
especially in the country districts. The towns which
had been founded, or transformed, by Greek monarchs-
in the period after Alexander possessed, and retained
under Roman rule, a limited local autonomy which was
the shadow of the proud independence of the old Greek
city-state, though the encroachments of the central
authority slowly sapped their vitality. In our period^

20 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

however, this disintegrating process was not far advanced ;
and on the other hand the frequent elevation of these
towns to full municipal rank, carrying with it the
Roman citizenship for the municipal aristocracy, gave a
very secure position to the city-state within the En-pire.
In these municipal communities the old keen intellectual life
of Greece, fertilized by its new association with Oriental
thought, flourished exceedingly. Alexandria, Ephesus,
Antioch, and many other cities, had their schools of
philosophy ; but not only so : philosophy had come out of
the schools, and was rapidly becoming a concern of the man
an the street, who listened with at least that measure of
interest which fashion decreed to the " preaching friars" of
the Cynic or Stoic doctrines. His understanding of them
might be exceedingly superficial, and he might listen only to
find subjects for after-dinner talk ; but at least he was not
hopelessly at sea when he heard a philosophic term used in
conversation. There was a large reading public, and books
of a sort were plentiful and fairly cheap. Not philosophy
alone, however, but religion too ? was becoming a popular
concern. Alongside the stately public rituals of the various
cities were the more or less private and independent religious
brotherhoods which tried to provide a religious atmosphere
more fervent and moresatisfying to the feelings of the ordinary
man than those antiquated and formal rites could supply.

There was one very widelyspread religion which combined
the splendour of antiquity, the tenacity of a national faith,
and the direct personal appeal of a religion of heart and life
the religion of the Jews. This strange people was already
becoming cosmopolitan. Few towns of any size throughout
the Eastern provinces of the Empire were without their
Jewish colonies. In some of the greatest the Ghetto* was
an element of extreme significance in the corporate life of
the place* The Jews had already embarked on that career
for which they seem so singularly endowed by nature the

A CITIZEN OF NO MEAN CITY 21

career of finance. 1 Their eminence in this walk of life,
together with their fanatical nationalism and their queer
religious customs, made them far from popular. Yet the
attraction of Judaism was strongly felt, especially in those
circles where men could not find satisfaction with the
State religions. The Jewish communities, or synagogues
civil and religious brotherhoods enjoying much liberty
of self-government were almost everywhere a nucleus
for a more or less loosely knit group of " God-fearers,"
to use the Jewish term, who adopted many of the beliefs
and practices of their Hebrew neighbours without actually
becoming Jews.

The ancient city of Tarsus in Cilicia is a favourable
example of the municipal city-state ; Oriental in the
background of its life and traditions, markedly Greek
in its culture, and enjoying a secure position in the general
order of the Empire. It had its school of philosophy, in
which a succession of able teachers had given a pre-eminence
to the Stoic sect. Its commerce prospered. Doubtless
the important Jewish colony was intimately associated
with this side of the city's life. Among them was at least
one family possessed of the Roman citizenship, which
implies, probably, membership of the order from which
the local magistrates were drawn, and at any rate some social
standing in the town. It is with a son of this family that
we have to do. 3 The boy had the old Hebrew name of
Sha'ul, famous in history as the name of the first King of
Israel, whose tribe, that of Benjamin, was also that of these

1 Perhaps the earliest allusion to Jewish money-lenders occurs
in a papyrus of the year 41 of our era. The papyrus is a letter
to a man in money difficulties, and contains the salutary advice
* Beware of the Jews ! ' See Milligan : Greek Papyri, No. 15.

* Ac. xzii. 25-28, The fact that Paul learned a trade, that
of tent-making, does not necessarily conflict with what is here
'said of his family's social position.

22 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

Tarsian Jews. That, however, was only his home-name.
To his fellow-citizens outside the synagogue he was Paulus.
He must, of course, have possessed a Roman family name
and first name we may think of him as Gaius Julius
Paulus, or Gnaeus Pompeius Paulus, if we wish to fit
him into his natural environment in the city of his birth.
He learned to speak and write Greek with ease. He
could quote Greek poets, and use the popular philosophical
language of the time easily and naturally. With all this,
however, he was by no means a Greek. His family belonged
to the Puritans of Judaism nationalist in outlook, strict in
religious observance. They spoke Aramaic at home, even
though they used Greek at market or in the City Council-
chamber.3 The boy was, in fact, sent to Jerusalem, the
national capital, in order th&t his education should be strong
on the distinctively Jewish side. He made great strides
in his studies, and was probably preparing for the career of
a Rabbi, when events occurred which disturbed the tenor
of his life.4

A new sect had appeared within Judaism. It was com-
posed of the followers of a Galilsean craftsman, who with-
out any apparent authority had set up for a Rabbi, and had
scandalized the religious leaders by his bold appeal to the
common people and his intensely critical attitude to the
Law and the Temple. He had fallen into their hands,
and they had secured his condemnation at the hands
of the Roman Governor on the charge of being a claimant
to the throne of Judaea a preposterous charge which
nevertheless seemed to have some foundation in his well-
attested claim to be the " Messiah/' The execution had
not fulfilled its purpose to any considerable extent ; for

3 Tliis assumes that E/3pa7oc in Phil- iii. 5 has something
of the same sliade of meaning as in Ac. vi. i. In any case Paul
spoke Aramaic, Ac. zxii. 2, and Aramaic was the language of
his inner life: cf. xxvi, 14. 4 Ac, xxii. 3, Gal. i. 14.

A CITIZEN OF NO MEAN CITY 23

the followers of the Galilaean asserted that he was still alive,
and apparently got people to believe this extraordinary
statement 5 for the sect was growing with alarming
rapidity. The young Paul saw here a vocation which com-
manded his ardent devotion. He would be the instrument
of the God of his fathers in putting down this pestilent and
blasphemous heresy. After some very effective work to
this end in the city and its neighbourhood, he obtained a com-
mission from the religious authorities to extend the good
work. He set out for Damascus with instructions to the
local synagogue there to accept his direction in rooting out
the Galilaeans.5

On the way something happened. Paul arrived at the
city of Damascus in sorry plight nervously shaken and
half blind. As he recovered, instead of carrying out his
commission he commenced a vigorous campaign on behalf
of the faith he had set out to destroy. 6 From this time on his
whole life was given to the propagation of Christianity
His activities were by no means always pleasing to the older
Christians, and especially to their leaders, but after a time
he succeeded in establishing some sort of a concordat with
the principal men of the Christian community at Jerusalem,
which left him a free hand in his mission to the populations
of the Roman provinces outside Judaea, including the non-
Jewish elements in those populations.? Indeed,as time went
on, the non-Jewish elements in the Christian communities
he founded greatly preponderated over the Jewish, and the
type of Christianity which prevailed among them was of a
broader, more cosmopolitan type than that of the original
community. It was above all a religion of emancipation.
" For liberty you were called," is the watchword of Paul's
great controversy. ' This liberty rested upon a personal

5 Ac. viii. 1-3, be. 1-2, Gal. i. 13, I Cor. zv. 9.

6 Ac. ir. 3-30, zxii. 3-21, xrvi. 4-23, Gal. i. 15-17*

7 Ac. iv. 1-35, Gal. ii. i-io.

24 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

and inward relation to Christ, replacing allegiance to laws
and traditional institutions. The person of Christ was thus
not less, but possibly more, central to the new Christians
than even to the first preachers of the faith 5 and Paul's
mission was an assertion of the completeness and indepen-
dence of the Christian faith. It meant that the new religion
had broken through the narrow limits of a mere Jewish
sect, and set out to claim the world. Paul, Roman citizen
as he was, would seem to have conceived the idea a wild
idea it may well have appeared of "the Empire for
Christ.'* In pursuit of it he spent years in travelling
up and down the Roman ways which had linked up
the world of that age in so wonderful a fashion, and
in navigating the Eastern Mediterranean in storm and
shine.

It was an adventurous life he led and a perilous. Rob-
bers still haunted, in spite of Rome, the inland regions of Asia
Minor ; and the fleet which had swept the Levant of pirates
could not control the Levantine storms, which at least four
times brought the intrepid traveller to shipwreck, and once
tossed him for twenty-four hours in open sea before rescue
arrived. In addition there were the perils to which the
propagator of unpopular doctrines exposes himself, even
in an age so tolerant on the whole as the first century. It
was no doubt something of a joke among Paul's friends that
he had once outwitted his enemies by escaping from Damascus
in a basket let down from a window, but it was no joke that
he was three times scourged by local magistrates (in spite
of his Roman citizenship), and no less than five times received
the savage maximum penalty of " forty stripes save one "
from the Jewish synagogue authorities. This penalty, it
is said, was usually commuted or reduced on grounds of
mere humanity, and the fact that Paul underwent it five
times gives us a hint of the great physical strength which
he must have possessed, in spite of his insignificant appear*

A CITIZEN OF NO MEAN CITY 25

ance and his recurrent attacks of a complaint which may
have been malarial. 8

Of his earlier preaching tours we have only the most
meagre accounts. Later the record, partly in the form of
a diary made at the time, which is generally attributed to his
medical attendant Luke, is much more complete. We can
trace his strategy. He would settle down in some central
spot, preferably a Roman conventus or assize town, such as
Ephesus, Philippi, or Corinth. Very often he found a
favourable starting-point in the local synagogue ; and if
the doors of the synagogue were closed to him when it
was discovered how revolutionary his teaching really was,
at least he had by that time made good his footing among the
" God-fearers." Sometimes he spoke quite publicly, like
the Cynic preachers, in the market-places. At Ephesus
he hired a philosophers lecture-hall after the morning session
was over, and gave instruction there daily from 1 1 to 4.9
Meanwhile he supported himself by his trade of tent-
making. At Corinth his trade was the means of winning
him a footing among the Jews of the place, and of gaining
for him one of his most permanent friendships. He found
work with a Jew from the Black Sea and his wife, who
apparently were in a somewhat large way in the tent-manu-
facturing business, and travelled between Rome and Ephesus.
Prisca and Aquila (the lady is almost always mentioned first)
became his trusted coadjutors in the mission ; and the
incident may suggest to us how the very mobile conditions
of international trade and industry in that period lent them-
selves to the spread of new ideas. 10

After preaching came the organization of the new

8 II Cor. xi. 23-28, I Cor. iv. 9-13, Gal. iv. 13, II Cor. xii.
7-9.

9 This piece of information is given only in certain MSS. of
Ac. m. 9, but it probably embodies a good tradition.

10 Ac. rviii. 2-3, 18-20, I Cor. xvi. 19.

26 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

Christians into communities, formed partly on the model of
the Jewish synagogue with its traditions of self-government,
and partly on the lines of the guilds and brotherhoods, which
were so popular among the middle and lower classes of the
Empire. The actual amount of organization was kept
to a minimum, and free co-operation was the central idea.
The members of these communities were mainly obscure
persons, many of them poor persons, slaves or freedmen,
some of them in business, or holding positions under the
municipalities, or even in the imperial Civil Service.
A few, but not many, persons of wealth ; a few, but
not many, highly educated persons, might be found in close
fellowship with their poorer neighbours in the brotherhood
of the Christian Church. 11

With these scattered communities Paul kept in constant
touch, partly through his own and his friends' continual
travels, and partly by correspondence, of which we possess
some valuable specimens. These letters are for the most
part called forth by circumstances. They do not set out
to be " literature," but to meet the occasion. One of them
is a brief note to a personal friend, about a slave who had
run away. Most of the others discuss matters of interest
to the particular churches addressed. Two only, those to
the Romans and to the Ephesians, make any attempt at a
systematic and comprehensive statement of a line of thought.
It is from these fragmentary materials that we have to
reconstruct Paul's ideas. It is obvious that we cannot hope
in such circumstances to attain great completeness or pre-
cision. But while there are disadvantages in possessing our
materials in this casual form, there are advantages which
more than compensate. The letters of Paul are intensely

11 I Cor* L 26, Rom. xvi. 23, Phil. v. 22, Phm. 8-16
(master and skve) ; the persons who are mentioned as entertaining
the local congregation in their house must have been relatively
wdl-to-do : see Rom. xvi. 5, 23, 1 Cor. xvi. 19, Col. iv. 1 5, Phm. 2

A CITIZEN OF NO MEAN CITY 27

alive alive as few documents are alive which have come
down to us from so remote antiquity. The7 give us, not a
mere scheme of thought, but a living man. We have
the same intimate knowledge of Paul that we have, also
through his letters, of Cicero, and of scarcely anyone
else in those times.

He was a person of extraordinary versatility and variety
He was an enthusiast and a mystic, with powers of rapt
contemplation beyond the common. He was also one who
could apply the cold criticism of reason to his own dreams,
and assess soberly the true value of the more abnormal
phenomena of religion. This combination of enthusiasm
with sanity is one of his most eminent marks of greatness.
His thought is strong and soaring, adventurous rather than
systematic. He had a hospitable mind, and a faculty for
assimilating and using the ideas of others which is a great
asset to anyone who has a new message to propagate : he
could think in other people's terms. In it all he was
dominated by a white-hot zeal for the truth of which he
was convinced as he was convinced of his own existence ;
and more, by a personal devotion to "the Lord Jesus,"
as he habitually called the divine Person who, as he believed,
had spoken to him first on the road to Damascus and never
again left his side. That devotion was his religion, and it
controlled his thought and his life. With this went a
strong humanity, and a longing that others should enter
into the free and j oyous life that he had found. This longing
was not the mere fervour of the religious bigot for his own
creed. It was the passion of a man who loved men and
had a genius for friendship. His was a warmly emotional
nature, passionate in affection, passionate also in opposition
when his hostility was aroused. He said and wrote things
he was sorry for, when he wrote or spoke in heat ; but it
was always a generous heat, kindled by no selfish feelings.
The most difficult lesson he had to learn from his Lord

28 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

was that of tolerance and charity. We can see him again
and again in his letters pulling the rein upon his passion
lest it get out of control. It was perhaps partly a sense
of the need to cultivate tolerance, partly a sense of strategy,
which led him at times into ways of accommodation
which were easily misunderstood, not only, perhaps, by
opponents. He may have made mistakes in this direction,
but we car hardly respect too highly the efforts of this
naturally intolerant man to " become all things to all men "
to go to the very verge of compromise, and to risk mis-
understanding, that he might assert the central and essential
principle over against relatively unimportant accidents.
That he was able to do so was the result of a sympathy
sufficiently rare in strong, self-confident natures which
could see very clearly the other man's point of view. This
faculty sometimes makes difficulties for Paul's interpreters !
To these qualities it is hardly necessary to add, so patent is
it, that this man displayed an inflexible determination, a
persistence that nothing could weary, and a courage that
was not a mere constitutional audacity, but a steady forti-
tude prepared for anything except retreat. 12

He fell a victim to the malice of his old associates, who
could not forgive him for becoming the leader in a movement
which had shaken their position to its foundations. On a
visit to Jerusalem he was set upon by a mob, and rescued
by the Roman officer in command of the garrison. The
Jewish authorities preferred charges against him which he
offered to answer, as was his privilege, before the Emperor's
tribunal. The result of the appeal was that he attained,

Ia The personal traits of the man come out most vividly in
the Second Epistle to the Corinthians and in those to the Galatians
and Philippians. To read these letters rapidly through, either
in the original or in a good modern translation, neglecting for
the moment the details of the argument, is the best way to dis-
cover the Apostle as a real man.

A CITIZEN OF NO MEAN CITY 29

in strange fashion, his lifelong ambition of visiting Rome. T 3
During a long imprisonment he continued his activities,
both by intercourse with a wide circle in the City, and by a
lively correspondence, which contains some of the most
mature fruits of his thought. Towards the end, however,
he found himself almost forsaken, and it was a lonely man
whom we see dimly through the mists of tradition led to the
Three Fountains by the Ostian Way to receive the sword-
stroke which was his last prerogative as a Roman. His
tomb is beneath "St. Paul's without the Walls" ; and in
spite of the mighty impression he made in his own day, in
spite of the veneration of his name, for the bulk of the
Christian Church this passionate champion of a religion
free, personal, and ethical remains " outside the walls.'* J 4
It is for those who can never satisfy themselves with insti-
tutional or legal religion that he has in every age a message.

Z 3 Ac. ixi.*-xiviii. The epistles to the Ephesians, Philip-
pians, Colossians, and Philemon probably belong to the Roman
imprisonment.

J 4 I cannot remember to whom I owe this allusion to San Polo
fuori le Mura. There seems no reason to reject the tradition
that this noble building marks the actual burial-place of the Apostle.

CHAPTER III
THE HOPE OF THE WORLD

How did the first great Christian missionary look upon
the world he lived in, its condition and destiny ? Paul
has been regarded as a pessimist, and if optimism means the
belief that this world as it stands is the best of all possible
worlds, then it is difficult to clear him of the charge. He
found the world deeply marked with failure and imperfec-
tion ; but he never dreamed that it need remain so, or that
it could ultimately remain so, 1 The whole universe, he
says, is groaning and travailing in pain. It is full of suffer-
ing and it is a slave to decay " subject to vanity.** That
word, echoing the haunting refrain of Ecclesiastes, the
classic of pessimism, accurately calls up those suggestions
of tiresome futility which the world of nature with its
ceaseless round of change and decay brought to the mind of
Paul as of many other observers, especially in the East. Man
too is part of nature, and shares its heritage of pain and
thwarted endeavour. " They were born ; they were
wretched ; they died." So in an Eastern tale the Wise Man
sums up the course of human history. So far the outlook
of Paul does agree with the typical Oriental pessimism.

But for him that is not the whole story. Beside
the groaning and travailing there is in the world an
"eager expectation." The whole universe, with head
outstretched and intense gaze, is waiting for something very
glorious which shall finally deliver it from slavery to futility
and give a meaning to all its pangs. It is a sorry world, but

1 What follows is mainly based on Rom. viii* 18 2C.
30

THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 31

an expectant world, subject to vanity but saved in hope;
travailing now, but destined to glory. It is a world, above
all, with a real history ; and that is what Oriental pessimism
never allows. But the conception of a universe in which
there is real movement and real development is very con-
genial to the modern mind. Indeed, we feel ourselves here
very much at one with Paul in his view of the world. We,
like him, dare not deny the miserable facts of pain and failure,
in nature and in man as part of nature ; but we would fain
believe that the change and flux have a tendency, and that
tendency an upward one. That the upward tendency is
automatic and inevitable we are perhaps less sure than our
fathers. Perhaps we feel, like Paul, that the universe or
at least this earth is waiting for something. And perhaps,
too, Paul was right in thinking that the key to its destiny
was in the hand of man.

For us, even more definitely than for him, man is
part of nature. In man the energy of the material
world, the instinct of animal life, rises precariously
and incompletely, but really into the sphere of con-
sciousness and of will. In him the apparently blind
impulse towards greater perfection working, as we
believe, in the universe, attains a measure of freedom
and self-direction. In him also instinct, become rational,
can turn back upon the material world out of which he has
partly emerged and actually control its changes, aid its
advance, intercept its decay. Directly upon his body,
indirectly upon, other parts of the physical universe, the
thought of man, and the action which is the outcome of
his thought, works beneficently or destructively according
to his choice. For the most part his action upon the world
seems blundering and of doubtful value. The immense
control of matter that man has gained our so-called
progress " is of very uncertain benefit to the universe
concieved as a system aiming at perfection in every part after

32 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

its kind. But if man himself could be different ; if his
own life were altered by the attainment of right relations
with God and with his fellow-man, his role in the world in
which he lives might be a more beneficent one than we
can well imagine. The artist uses the material world as
means to the expression of that love of beauty which is
one aspect of the love of God, and thereby transfigures
the material delivers it, as Paul might say, from the bondage
of decay into the liberty of glory. If we could all become
artists over the whole of life, using our whole environment
to express the highest spiritual relations within our reach,
is it not possible that the influence of humanity upon
the world might change its whole aspect ? Paul at least
thought that in some way the universe was waiting for man
to attain right relations in the spiritual sphere " waiting
for the revealing of the sons of God,"

A recent poem addresses " Everyman " in language
which beautifully suggests a thought akin to Paul's. 3

" All things search until they find
God through the gateway of thy mind.

Highest star and humblest clod
Turn home through thee to God.

When thou rejoicest in the rose
Blissful from earth to heaven she goes 5

Upon thy bosom summer seas
Escape from their captivities j

Within thy sleep the sightless eyes
Of night revisage Paradise ;

* Quoted from the poem To Everyman, by Edith Anne Stewart,
published in the Nation^ November 1918.

THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 33

In thy soft awe yon mountain high
To his creator draweth nigh 5

This lonely tarn, reflecting thee.
Returned) to eternity ;

And thus in thee the circuit vast
Is rounded and complete at last,

And at last, through thee revealed

To God, what time and space concealed."

How Paul conceived the " emancipation " of the
physical world we cannot tell. Many contemporary
thinkers imagined a miraculous change of the very sub-
stance of things a new heaven and a new earth in
strict literalness. Paul may have shared the belief* But
the important point seems to be that he conceived such
a change as no accident, but directly connected with
the working out of human relations. In attacking what
was wrong with men he firmly believed that he was
attacking the problem of the universe. Shall we put it in
this way, that the problem of reality is at bottom a problem
of personal relations ? 3 No purely physical speculations will
ever solve for us the problem of this tangled universe.
Personality holds the clue ; and the solution is personal and
practical The spiritual aspirations of man, faithfully
followed, let us into the secret of evolution and give the
only hint we can get of its purposes.

We turn, then, from the Apostle's philosophy of the world
to his philosophy of human history. We shall expect to
find it based upon a gloomy estimate of human life as it is,
saved from pessimism by a tremendous faith in what it may
become. He saw the world of men in two opposing

3 This is a dominant idea, as I understand it, of Mr. Fearon
Halliday's book in this series, Reconciliation and Reality.

3

34 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

groups his own nation and pagan society, i.e. practically
the pagan Graeco-Roman Empire. His interest in that
Empire, its ethical and social life and problems, was intense.
It dated, doubtless, not from his conversion to Christianity,
but from his youth at Tarsus. Only the character of that
interest was changed from condemnation and despair to
hope when he looked afresh with the eyes of Christ. The
Empire indeed, as he saw it, was rotten with vice and injus-
tice. His picture of pagan morals in the opening chapter
>f the Epistle to the Romans is lurid, but most of it could
bs corroborated from pagan sources. His judgment,
however, was not undiscriminating or blind. Even in the
pigan he recognized a natural knowledge of God, a con-
science bearing witness to a "law written on the heart,"
ai instinctive knowledge of right and wrong.4 Its political
system, he confessed, aimed at the vindication of right and
the suppression of wrong, and in its measure succeeded. 5
Its imperial law restrained the threatened outbreak of
undiluted and anarchic evil. 6 And yet he saw a monstrous
perversion of the whole. A mass of humanity, the off-
spring of God, had somehow taken a wrong turn so decisive
that at every step it was farther from God. The light that
was in it had become darkness ; and God had given it over
n its own unrestrained passions.

It is in this strain that Paul inveighs in his letter to Rome
against the corruption of the Pagan world ; and so far, we
can imagine an audience of Pharisaic Jews listening with
applause. Suddenly Paul turns upon them and drives home
the charge that they have known better but not done better.
" You call yourself a Jew, and rely upon your law, and
boast of your God. . . . You set up for a guide of the blind,
a light to the benighted, a trainer of the ignorant, a teac er of
infants. , . . You teach others, but do not teach yourself.

4 Rom. i. 19, ii. 14-15. 5 R m. xiii. 1-6.

* II Thess. ii. 6-7

THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 35-

You preach * Do not steal,' and you are a thief ! YOIL
preach * Do not commit adultery,* and you are an
adulterer ! You abominate ' idols,' but you plunder
their temples ! You, who boast about your law, by break-
ing the law dishonour God ! " 7 They are strong words
for a Jew to use to Jews. We can surely overhear in them
the indignant shame of a high-minded Israelite who found
that in the great cities of the pagans men of his own race
had made the name of Jew to stink by their hypocrisy and
baseness.

We must not forget that the darkness of this picture is
relieved by a pagan here and there who " did by nature the
things of the Law " and by at least a faithful remnant among
renegade Israel. But Paul found nowhere, neither in the-
pagan world nor yet among his own people, the moral power
and stability which his sense of the divine holiness demanded
of u sons of God." Out of the mass of weakness and corrup-
tion the universe awaited their revealing : where could they
be found ? To the inquiring mind, all history comes to be
a search for the family of God, the Divine Commonwealth
through which alone man and the world can attain emanci-
pation. This Commonwealth of the sons of God can only
be of God's own creation. Thus from the divine point of
view history shows God seeking His sons among sinful
humanity. Paul had inherited from his Pharisaic training
a belief in divine predestination, though the Pharisees, we
are told, somehow managed to preserve alongside of this-
doctrine a belief in human free will. The use, however,
which Paul makes of the doctrine is most instructive. It is-
for him the means of asserting and maintaining the freedom-
and originality of God's personal dealings with men.

The Pharisaic God was for practical purposes an Absentee.
He had created the world ; at a few points in the remote
past He had definitely intervened ; in the future He would
? Rom. ii. i-ii.

3 6 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

once more intervene in Judgment ; but in the present age
the history of man was the mechanical working-out of an
inexorable Law. The pagan mind, on the other hand, was
"haunted by fatalism. In that age philosophy tended to
support with its authority the ancient popular superstition
.that a man's fete was controlled by his stars. You were
born with a certain horoscope, and by that your fete was
irrevocably fixed. That the dominion of the "world-
rulers," the "elemental spirits," was broken 8 was a part of
the message of primitive Christianity which scarcely appeals
to us ; but it came with the sense of a tremendous relief
-to the spirit-ridden mind of the first century, as it still comes
to many in China and India. Over against the mechani-
cal rule of law and the domination of the fetal star alike,
Paul maintains that God always and in every age is free to
deal personally with men. 9 He called Abraham to be His
son, but He did not then leave natural heredity to produce
His Divine Commonwealth. He chose Isaac ; He chose
Jacob ; He called seven thousand in Elijah's day, who stood
firm against the idolatry of their time ; He chose the faithful
remnant on whom Isaiah set his hope the saving salt of a
lost people. Last of all He ordained as His Son Jesus the
son of David " according to the flesh," and through Him
brought a multitude out of all nations into " adoptive son-
ship." 10 At every point a free, personal act of God.

The doctrine of absolute and arbitrary divine sovereignty
which accompanies this view of history seems to us
destructive of human freedom in any real sense ; but
in the early preaching of the Gospel it served a purpose of

8 The <mux*a of Gal. iv. 3, 9, CpL ii. 8, 20, are not the
material c dements * of which the world is made, but the * phantom
intelligences/ as Mr. Thomas Hardy might call them, supposed
to animate and control the visible universe. Cf. Eph. vi. 12.

9 Rom. ir., xi. 1-12.

x Rom. i. 3-4, Gal. iii. 16-17, J 9> ** 4~5

THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 37

the highest value. If you could believe that your destiny
was not decided by the working of mechanical law, or
determined by a ruthless fate, but that the divine vocation
of which you were conscious in your own soul was an act of
sovereign power on the part of a God present here and now
to save you, it would surely give a new sense of assurance
and stability in the face of all hostile forces. It is with
that intent that Paul always makes use of the argument
from predestination, " Those whom He foreknew He
also predestined ; and those whom He predestined He also
called. ... If God be for us, who can be against us ? " '
And any philosophy which admits a divine government of
the universe must leave a place for something like this
Pauline theory of a "selective purpose." I2 As Paul meant
it, it is not a doctrine of determinism, but rather a protest
against the prevalent determinism of his time by the-
assertion that a real " fresh start " is possible at any time-
where God comes into fresh touch with man.

So much for history viewed from the divine end. From
the human end it is the story of the progressive response of
sons of God to the calling of their Father, and the resultant
constitution of the People of God. On man's part,,
simple trust in God gives play to the divine purpose.
The inevitable instance of such trust in the past was
Abraham : " Abraham trusted God," Paul quotes more
than oncers So soon as a man was found to take that
attitude to God, the People of God, or the Divine Common-
wealth, was already in existence, if only in germ. It was
maintained and increased, Paul argued, by exactly the same
means, by the successive perspnal response of men in each

" Rom. viii. 28-39, Eph. i. 3-14, cf. Gal. i. 15.

13 tar' ktcXoyriv irpititnc, Rom. iz. II. A transposition of
the terms would give us * purposive selection/ as distinct from
merely * natural "selection.'

X 3 Gal. iii. 6-18, Rom. iv.

38 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

.-generation to the calling of God. z 4 Behind all the scholastic
arguments of the Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians
lies the crucial question whether religion is a matter
of national inheritance and external tradition, or a matter
of ever-fresh personal response to the gracious dealing of
God. In form, the nation founded by Abraham was the
People of God ; but " the majority of them God did not
choose," as was shown by the fact that in spite of their
participation in the ordinances of the Covenant they " were
unfaithful."^ The nation possessed the outward forms of a
Divine Commonwealth or Kingdom of God or "Theo-
cracy," but it 'was only a minority in the heart of it that kept
.hold of the reality. Elijah's Seven Thousand, Isaiah's
Remnant these were the representatives of the true
People of God, the faithful Divine Commonwealth hidden
in the bosom of apostate Israel. 16 Not that even they could
k be said to have attained perfect obedience to the precepts
of the divine Will, or to be able to claim God's favour on
the basis of their own achievement, but their u faith " in
God kept them true, amid doubts, uncertainties, failures,
and imperfections, as they waited confidently for the next
stage of His dealing. For the time being, this Divine
Commonwealth was in "bondage." Like an heir in his
minority " under tutors and guardians," it led a kind of
provisional existence under the shadow of the Law, unable
to win freedom of action or to become a power of salvation
to the world. 17

X 4 Rom. ix. 6-29, ii. 4-7, Gal. iii. 7-9.

I Cor* x. i-io, cf. Rom. iii. 1-20. The word cvfow-Iv
does not mean approval following upon conduct, but a free self-
determination on the part of God; cf* Gal. i. 15, I Cor. i. 21,
Col. i. 19, Eph. i. 5, 9, Phil. ii. 13.

16 Rom. xi. 4, ix. 27-29,

** Gal. iii. 23-24, iv. 1-3 : note that these statements are
made not about any particular individuals, but about the People
of God considered as an historical entity.

THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 39

The upshot of past history, as Paul saw it, may be
put in these terms : in the pagan world, a few isolated
individuals doing, in some measure, the will of God
as revealed in their consciences, but unable to form a
real community; 18 in Israel, a Theocracy in form, but
so bound and hedged about as to be unable to effect
anything for God in the world at large. The prophets
had always foreseen that this age must be succeeded by
another, in which the free life of the Spirit should create
a world-wide society or Kingdom of God. Now with the
Resurrection of Christ, Paul held, this new age began. The
heir had come of age j the dim light of an ever-deferred hope
had given place to the clear dawning of the u The Day.' 7 Iu
Out of Israel and out of the pagan world alike God was
calling His sons into a real community-life through which
the world should be saved. This is the " mystery kept
silent through agelong periods, but now revealed." 20 A
"mystery" to Paul's Greek readers meant a dramatic
spectacle which conveyed to those who had the key deep
truths of the unseen world unsuspected by the " profane "
mind, and not to be expressed in language. Even so the
historic drama of Christ's death and resurrection had brought
into clear light the hidden purposes of God, by uniting
faithful men, out of all nations and classes, in one firm
commonwealth free and powerful to do the will of God.

Thus the New Age had begun. That is a fundamental
belief of all early Christians. They knew they were living
at a crisis at the crisis of History. They were " children
of The Day " the day of God's self-revelation ; they

*8 This is the judgment also of the author of IV Ezra : see
iii. 36, " Individual men of note : ndeed Thou mayst find to have
kept Thy precepts ; but nations Thou shalt not find " (c. A.D. 100).

X 9 I Thess. v. 4-8, II Thess. i. 10, ii. 2, I Cor. i. 8 iii. 13,.
v. 5, II Cor. i. 14, vi. 2, Rom. xiii. 12-13, Phil. i. 6, 10, ii. 16.

* Rom. xri. 25-26, Col. i. 25-29, and espec. Eph. iii. 1-12*

40 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

were inhabitants of a new world. 21 They were quite sure
that fresh powers had entered into them, and that the
divine purpose was forcing its way through their efforts
into the world at large. And though they knew also that
the time of crisis must bring sufferings which they must
share, of which indeed they must bear the brunt, 22 yet they
were upheld and animated by a vivid hope to which nothing
seemed too good to be true. That hope clothed itself in
strange apocalyptic imagery. Paul, in his earlier letters,
and no doubt in his earlier preaching, made free use of this
imagery, though it is clear that he was all the time re-inter-
preting it. At first he certainly expected that before long
at all events in his lifetime Christ would visibly return
and lead His people in an aggressive campaign against all
evil ; *3 that He would reign over a Kingdom which would
come to include those Israelites who in the course of the
" selective purpose " had fallen out by the way, and, we may
take it, those pagans also who had hitherto remained un-
repentant, until the whole race should be gathered into
one. 3 4 At the End of All, having put down all hostile or
rival authority and power in heaven and on earth, He
would offer us all to God, and God would be all and
in all.5

ai I Thess. v. 5, I Cor. x. 1 1. Paul never says in so many
words, as does his follower the author to the Hebrews, that
Christians possess ' the power* of the coming age ' (Heb. vi. 5) ;
but something of the kind is implied both in his constant antithesis
of Christianity to ' this age ' (Rom. xii. 2, I Cor. ii. 6-8, II Cor.
iv. 4, Gal. i. 4, Eph, ii. 2, etc.), and in his use of eschatological
language in the present or perfect tense instead of the future
(Rom. i. 17-18, aTronaXv-rrrerai, I Cor. i. 1 8, II Cor. ii. 15,
cru^6fjLyoL 9 cnroXXvfjLeyQL, I Thess. ii. 1 6 <tfa<7' rj opyrj etc.).

" I Thess. iii. 3, Col. i. 24, Rom. v. 3-5, cf. II Cor. xii, 10,
Phil. iii. 10.

*3 L Thess. iv. I3~v. ii, II Thess. ii. r-io.

*4 Rom. zi. 11-33.

*5 I Cor. iv. 20-28.

THE HOPE OF THE WORLD 41

Putting aside so far as we can what is (for us at least)
merely figurative in this sketch of the future, we can at
least see how for Paul the time in which he lived was
the turning-point of history ; before Christ, the disinte-
gration of humanity, and the gradual selection of a small
remnant to carry on God's purpose ; from the coming of
Christ, the re-integration of the race, the inclusion, step
by step, of the " rejected," and the attainment of final unity
for all that is, in the perfected Sovereignty or Kingdom of
God. As he grew older, the apocalyptic imagery of the
earlier days tended to disappear at least from the foreground
of his thought, and more and more his mind came to dwell
upon the gradual growth and upbuilding of the Divine
Commonwealth. He saw the Church going out into the
world to save the world, ready to " fill up what was lacking
of the sufferings of Christ " for the sake of mankind, and
restlessly seeking out the sons of God in the name of their
Father. He saw it impelled ever further and further in
the quest, constrained by the love of Christ, reconciling,
liberating, including in its universal fellowship Jew and
Greek, barbarian, Scythian, slave, freeman, and so working
out the divine purpose to " sum up all things in Christ." 26
If this is an idealized picture of what the Church has been
even at its best, it gives the standard of what it might be,
a perpetual rebuke and challenge to a Church which has
fallen from its ideal.

* Col. i. 17-29, ii, 19, iii. 10-11, EpL i. 3-ii. 23, cf. Phil. ii.

10-11.

CHAPTER IV

THE QUEST OF THE DIVINE
COMMONWEALTH

AN attempt has been made in the preceding chapter to
sketch the philosophy of history which can be discovered
in the writings of Paul. In its main outlines it is set forth
in his letter to the Christians of Rome. That fact is not
without significance. The Epistle to the Romans is the
manifesto of Paul's missionary programme written at the
very height of his activity, in the near prospect of a visit to
the imperial centre of the world. For the Romans, as for
us, it was necessary to have some understanding of his
philosophy of history if they were to appreciate what were
his aims and principles in preaching the Christian Gospel
throughout the Roman world. The hope of the world,
as he saw it, lay in the " revelation of the sons of God "
the realization of the Divine Commonwealth. In his
faith in Christ he held the key to the "mystery" of
that Divine Commonwealth. He knew the secret of its
realization. Hence he \vas a missionary.

In the circles in which Paul was brought up there was a
perfectly definite theory about the Divine Commonwealth.
He was a Jew, and the Jews believed themselves to be in
the most absolute sense God's chosen people. The divine
blessing was an estate entailed upon the historic nation
derived, as was believed, from Abraham, and preserved
intact through the centuries by its observance of the

QUEST OF DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 43

institutions summed up in the Mosaic Code. The
reverence and enthusiasm with which these archaic
institutions were regarded are almost inconceivable.
That they represented the eternal laws of all reality
was held certain. It was said that the Law was the
pre-existent plan accord ; ng to which the world had
been created, and that the Deity spent eternity in its
study. 1 The purport of such apparently hyperbolic ex-
pressions was clearly to identify the particular set of rules
for life and thought contained in the Pentateuch with
absolute truth and absolute right. With such a belief
it is no wonder that those who took it seriously had an out-
look upon the world which bears the appearance of national
arrogance run to an almost insane extreme. Strangely, and
yet intelligibly enough, even the Jew whose personal life
and conduct had little resemblance to the high ethical ideals
of the Old Testament felt an exaltation of spirit as he thought
that his nation alone of all peoples of the earth possessed
the inmost secret of things. The rest of mankind was there
for Israel's sake 3 to serve Israel or to chastise Israel as
might be Jehovah's inscrutable purpose, but in any case
to be subjugated or blotted out in the end, when God should

1 For passages from Rabbinic tradition setting forth these
ideas, see Weber, System Jer altsynagogalcn p&lastinischen Theologie
(1880), pp. 14-18. Much of this material is certainly late,
but it doubtless represents earlier views. The earliest definite
statement I can recall is the saying of R. Akiba, quoted p. 69.

a See especially IV Ezra (II Esdras) vi. 55-56: " Thou hast
said that for our sakes thou hast created this world. But as for
the other nations which are descended from Adam, thou hast
said that they are nothing, and that they are like unto spittle, and
thou hast likened the abundance of them to a drop on a bucket.*
This portion of IV Ezra is dated by internal evidence to A.D. 100.
The proud self-consciousness of Israel in contrast to the idolatrous
Gentiles is finely expressed in Wisdom xv. which offers an instruc-
tive comparison with Rom, Hi.

44 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

finally declare His judgment. The Jewish people was the
Divine Commonwealth.

The Pharisaic party which cherished these views with
deepest conviction was by no means indifferent to the fate of
the non- Jewish world. It is even probable that this sect
was prominent in the vigorous Jewish propaganda which
was going forward throughout the Mediterranean area at the
time when Christianity appeared. But in the nature of
things such propaganda could only be a kind of spiritual
imperialism. It rested on the assumption of the inherent
and eternal superiority of one nation and one form of culture
over all others. Individuals of other nations could be incor-
porated in the chosen people, but it was only as naturalized
aliens that they could take their place. They were held
at arm's length, admitted only grudgingly and by degrees
to the spiritual privileges of Israel, and they could only be
full members of the community by adopting all the peculiar,
and in part barbarous, rites and observances of the Jewish
religion, including the rite of circumcision, which was
counted by Greeks and Romans a degradation. It was
no wonder that the civilized world of the time looked with
scorn upon these pretensions, so opposed to the broad
humanism of the Stoics with their gospel of Cosmopolis, the
City of Zeus. For all that, Judaism had somewhere within
it a moral passion and power of regeneration before which
even Stoicism was impotent. Many an earnest soul was
willing even to bow to the arrogant pretensions of the Jew
for the sake of the ethical reality he stood for, so strangely
high and pure in spite of the meanness of its earthly
vessels.

In such a position of affairs we can see the peril to the
future of humanity. It is not good that men should submit
themselves to the dictation of any one people, whether in
politics or in religion. It is not good that the highest
personal morality should be associated with a corporate

QUEST OF DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 45

egotism. All imperialisms are a denial of the fundamental
unity of mankind, however bright their fallacious promise
of such a unity. The propaganda of Imperialism is a
propaganda against the brotherhood of man, and if missions
to the " heathen " or to the " lower classes " are inspired
by the national or class egotism which believes that "our
sort " must be right and everybody else must accept our
direction, then they are a form of spiritual imperialism.
" Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, play-actors ! " Jesus
is reported to have said; "you traverse sea and land
to make one convert, and when he is there, you make
him twice as much a child of Gehenna as yourselves." 3
It sounds severe, even unfair, but religious propa-
ganda which rests on sectional pride always runs this
risk.

Paul the Jew had to suffer the shattering of his deepest
beliefs before he came through to a new conception of a
missionary's work. He had to learn that there was no
distinction of Jew and Gentile. It needs some effort of
the imagination to realize what this surrender cost him.
Perhaps it was like an American of the South being obliged
to admit that he must sit at the feet of the negro, or an
Australian asked to view with equanimity, even to further,
the spread of " yellow " civilization. As a young man he
had heard the humanistic talk of popular Stoicism at Tarsus,
and his religious instincts revolted against what seemed an
obliteration of profound moral distinctions. Now he must
capitulate. The Stoics were right : God had made of one
stock all nations on earth. 4 Of all He made the same
demands, to all the same offer on the same terms.
In the present corruption of the world no one nation
could stand aloof and say, "This is the wickedness of
other people." If humanity was cursed by sin, all
had sinned, whether Jew or pagan, and all had missed
3 Mt. xziii. 15. 4 Ac. xvii. 26.

46 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

the divine splendour of ideal humanity.5 God alone
could make good what was amiss, and He could do it
only with men who abandoned all self-confidence (all
" glorying in the flesh," as our translation of Paul has it).
How this new creation was to take place we must presently
inquire. For the moment we are concerned to see this
man as the pioneer of a new method of establishing the
Divine Commonwealth. He saw it growing like a body,
cell to cell : or built like a temple, stone to stone, through
the sharing of a common life, the surrender to a common
purpose* The union of mankind he saw taking place at a
level of common humanity deeper than all the ramifications
of nationality, culture, sex or status. He asked only that
each should confess his part in the general wrong, and trust
God to put him right in God's own way not the way of his
preference (" not my own righteousness, but the righteous-
ness which comes from God through trusting Him").
On that common basis he saw a unity growing out of the
very diversity of men's minds and gifts many members,
but one body 5 diversity of gifts, but one spirit. 6 On these
terms he appealed to the devout Pharisee of the Jewish
synagogue, to the philosophers of Athens, the civil servants
of the Empire at Rome, the traders of Corinth, the artisans
of Ephesus, the slaves and " riff-raff" of the seaport towns,
the half-Greek inhabitants of Asiatic cities, and the bar-
barians of Malta and the Lycaonian highlands. With this
demand he stood before kings and proconsuls, and with the
same offer he won the rascal fugitive slave Onesimus, and
made him c * a brother beloved."

It has already been indicated that ideas of a universal
commcnwealth were present in the pagan world. Rome,
largely inspired by the sublime ideals of Stoicism (which in

5 Rom. in. 9-23.

6 I Cor. xii. 12-14, Eph. ii- 19-22, iv. 4-16 ; Gal. iiL 26-28,
Col, iii. 9-11 ; Rom. iii. 21-30, Phi. ii . 3-9.

QUEST OF DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 47

PauPs time gave a Prime Minister to the Empire, and in
the next century ascended the throne itself), was con-
sciously aiming at its establishment. Paul, himself a
Roman, was stirred by the thought of what Rome was
doing. Imperial Rome is the background of his greatest
epistle, and the writing of it was largely inspired by the
thrilling prospect of setting up the standard of Christ on its
ancient Seven Hills. And yet he knew that Rome must
fail. The Roman Empire could never become the King-
dom of God. It lacked the moral foundation. Even its
philosophic instructors were content to compromise with
institutions which oppressed men and superstitions which
degraded them. The Empire was founded on violence :
Rome ** made a solitude and called it peace." It trans-
cended national boundaries, but it ruled by an upper class
of the privileged and showed its contempt for the poor
by giving them "bread and circuses,'* Its blossoming might
be the fine flower of humane culture, but its roots were
in the degradation of slavery. And it demanded the abject
worship of an autocrat, which meant bondage, not of the
body alone, but of the spirit. The failure, in the end, of
this magnificent attempt to unify the human race justified
Paul's judgment on it. He sought its best ends, by means
which did not kill but made alive the individual spirit.
Rome crushed the individual to glorify the State. In the
end it destroyed itself by strangling or crippling every
institution of local government and every guild or corpora-
tion through which free co-operation was possible. It was
characteristic of Paul's mission that wherever he worked
there sprang up live, vigorous local communities, free and
democratic, where individual initiative was prized and
individual gifts found play. Each of these communities
felt itself to be a living embodiment of that City of God
whose ultimate reality was eternal in the heavens. " Your
citizenship is in heaven " you are a colony of the Divine

48 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

Commonwealth Paul wrote to the Christians of the
Roman colony of Philippi.7 This was because in each
individual member the great change had taken place
whereby the "life of the (New) Age" 8 became a personal
experience.

There is nothing which in the last resort can unite man-
kind but the free contagion of this life. It is a current
view to-day that economic interdependence will unify
mankind. It is questionable. Nor indeed can political
organization attain that end, as we are learning every day,
unless the spirits of men be made one. We see rather
a forecast of the true process when the vision of the
artist or the rapture of the musician draws men together
across the barriers, for they too have touched life at a point
deeper than our transient divisions. But there is some-
thing deeper and more universal than art or music, and of
that Paul speaks. Man is born to be a son of God, and only
in " the liberty of the splendour of the sons of God " can the
commonwealth of man be founded. The missionary enter-
prise of Christianity, in its ideal and largely in its practice,
is an indication of the true method of building the brother-
hood of man in which the Kingdom of God may find
expression. When the missionary enterprise enters, as it has
sometimes done, into an unnatural alliance with national
ascendancies and all the superstitions of Empire, it stultifies
itself. But when the missionary goes out, not as a European
or an American, but as a Christian simply, a son of God
seeking brotherly fellowship with sons of God waiting to be
revealed in all nations when he makes his appeal to the
simply human in men, speaking the word of reconciliation

7 Phil. iii. 20. UoXirevfjia is used specifically of a colony
of settlers who in a strange land reproduce the institutions of their

8 ZWT? Mnnoc (Rom. v. 21, vi. 22-3, Gal. vi. 8, etc.)
is properly the life of the cuwv of Messianic power and glory,
begun here and now for those who are * in Christ.*

QUEST OF DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 49

which unites us to God and to each other then he is the
truest servant of the coining Kingdom that the world can
show. Such was Paul the Missionary.

It was not to be expected that Jewish patriotism would
acquiesce in this treason to the national idea. The tradition
of privilege was too strong. Even any loftier souls who
may have given up the dream of political domination yet
clung tenaciously to their spiritual ascendancy. Jerusalem
might never become another Rome, but Jerusalem was the
only conceivably spiritual metropolis of the world. To
them Paul declared that their Jerusalem was a slave city,
bound hand and foot to an obsolete tradition : " Jerusalem
above is free, which is our Mother ! " 9 The unifying
patriotism of the City of God that " city within whose
walls the souls of the whole world may assemble " was in
that watchword pitted against the divisive patriotism of the
tribal State and tribal religion. That is the inner meaning
of the fight which Paul waged all his life against his old
associates.

There can be little doubt that in principle the question of
" universalism " was decided for Paul in the fact of his
conversion, even though it remains highly probable that
both his theory of the matter and his practice underwent
development. The Christianity with which he had come
into direct conflict was not the timid "right wing" which
under James the Lord's brother sought a quiet modus
vivendi with national Judaism, but the militant radical
section which the martyred Stephen had led into the most
decisive break with the national and legal tradition. 11 It was

9 Gal. iv. 21-31.

** Remain Rolland, Abwt the Battle (Eng. transl. 1916),
p. 54.

11 Stephen was accused of speaking against the Temple and
announcing the supersession of the Mosaic Law, Ac. vi. 13-14.
It appears that Paul was present at his examination before the
Sanhcdrin (Ac. viiL I, xxii* 20) and heard his defence, which,

50 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

to this radical Christianity that he was converted. From
the beginning he had against him the organized force of the
Jerusalem Sanhedrin and the synagogues. The main
count in their indictment was that he was a traitor to the
Law and a confederate of Gentiles. " It is the Jews," he
wrote bitterly from Corinth in the first letter of his that has
survived, " who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and
drove us out, who never obey God, who are the enemies of
all mankind, and who try to prevent us from speaking to the
pagans for their salvation" The turn of phrase shows
how Paul felt about it.

But he had also against him the conservative right
wing of the Church, which included some at least
of die original disciples, though we may believe that
converts from the sect of the Pharisees formed the
backbone of the party. x 3 So far as the more moderate
leaders are concerned, we can understand and respect
their position. They were cautious in the presence of
an untried venture. They saw, and perhaps report
exaggerated, the perils of Paul's bold propaganda. Some
of the language he used about freedom from law had
a dangerous suggestion of anarchy. They did not know
to what subversive doctrines he might commit the
Christian movement Moreover, they felt, and not un-
reasonably, that they were likely to know the mind of
their Master better than this new-comer who had never
heard Him speak, and they could not think that He
wished the door quite so widely opened. It is not the
only time in history that the nearest followers of a
great leader have failed to understand his secret, even
while they died for his cause.

if it is at all faithfully represented by the rather tedious speech
in Ac. vii, dwelt upon the temporary and relative character of
both Temple and Law.

* I Thess. ii. 15-16. *3 Ac. xv. 5, aori. 20.

QUEST OF DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 51

Nevertheless, Peter, generous and impulsive as ever,
had, without thinking much of what was implied, early
taken steps in the direction of a liberal attitude to
pagans. It was perhaps his influence which led to
the concordat under which Paul worked for some time
with the concurrence of the " pillars " of the Church at
Jerusalem, and according to the Acts of the Apostles it
was he who persuaded the Council of Jerusalem to sanc-
tion a liberal missionary policy in Syria and Cilicia. I 4 And
indeed when he visited Paul and his friends at Antioch, he
was quite carried away by the enthusiasm of the forward
movement. The controversy had come to hinge upon the
question of eating at table with converts from paganism who
had not been adopted into the community with the recognized
Jewish ceremonies, especially circumcision. Large questions
do sometimes turn upon small points. This point, however,,
was not so small as it might seem. It is not a small thing
to-day for an Indian Brahmin to break caste by eating with
a pariah. Moreover, the Christian brotherhood had from
the first made its life centre about the common table. To
refuse to break bread with a fellow-Christian was to deny
that he had any part in Christ, at whose table the brotherhood
met. Peter, however, sat at table with these half-Greek
Syrians in the friendliest way, and the difficulty seemed over.
Then came members of the extreme "right wing'*
adherents of James, but no doubt plus royallstes que It
roi. Peter, frightened, drew back. Even Paul's old friend
and leader, Barnabas, gave way. The dispute culminated
in a regrettable public quarrel between Peter and Paul, the
echoes of which, perhaps, were to be heard later even in the
Pauline churches. J 5 Peace, however, seems to have
been restored, as between the leaders. Peter and John
probably took in the end the liberal view, and even James

*4 Gal. ii. i-io, Ac. rv. 7-11.
J 5 Gal. ii. 11-14, cf. I Cor. i. 12.

52 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

kept on friendly terms with Paul, and it was not by any
ill-will of his, but quite the contrary, that his ill-calculated
tactics ultimately contributed to Paul's arrest and impri-
sonment. Ifi

But the extreme conservatives pursued him everywhere
with unabated zeal. They opened war by a powerful
mission to Galatia, where they all but succeeded in winning
to a Judaic Christianity the churches Paul had founded. 1 ?
From that time he had to count "perils from false brethren"
among the difficulties of his work. 18 During most of his
active life he was a nonconformist and a free-lance, regarded
with cool and rather suspicious tolerance by some of the most
respected leaders of the Church, and with horror by the
" ultra-orthodox " right wing. We need not impugn their
motives, as Paul did in the heat of controversy. They
were honest men and zealous servants of the Gospel as they
understood it Paul made mistakes, and some bad ones,
in the course of the struggle. But Paul was right and
his opponents were wrong on the main issue.

It was the controversy with the Jewish National Party
in the Church that drove Paul to formulate and defend the
principles underlying his Gospel. The laboured argument
which fills krge sections of the letters to Rome and Galatia
and which has often been treated as almost the only valuable
element in the Pauline writings is to be regarded as
apologetic directed against Pharisaic Judaism (which he
knew by early training from top to bottom) and its revival
within the Christian Church. This apologetic is almost
accidental ; it does not represent his missionary preaching ;
it represents the theoretical justification of its principles
against those who denied his right so to preach at all in the
name of Christ. Much of it is argumentum ad hominem

x * Ac. rxi. 20-30.

*7 Gal. i. 6-9, iii. 1-5, iv. 12-20, v. 1-12, vi. 12-16.

& II Cor. zi, 26.

QUEST OF DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 53

and of temporary validity only as addressed to those particular
adversaries. The very success he gained antiquated his
polemic. But concealed beneath these temporary forms of
thought is his permanent contribution to the philosophy of
religion. His victory, indeed, was less complete than it
seemed. By other channels than that of the Judaistic
propaganda the old spirit of Pharisaism entered into the
Church : its narrowness, its formalism, its bondage to
tradition, its proneness to national and class prejudice. We
shall not fight it to-day, in ourselves or in the Church,
with the precise weapons which Paul used 5 but if we can
read his essential thought out of its obsolete forms into the
living language of to-day we shall at least know how to
deal with that undying Pharisee whom most of us carry
beneath our hats. But, also we shall have learned what
Christianity is, from the man who, though he knew not
Christ after the flesh, divined better than any what Christ
stood and stands for

CHAPTER V
THE ANCIENT WRONG

WE have seen how Paul saw humanity in evil case,
and how he devoted himself to its rescue from this evil case
by " the revealing of the sons of God " as a closely knit
Divine Commonwealth. More precisely, he saw mankind
enslaved, and lived for its emancipation ; and he saw it
alienated, and lived for its reconciliation. Those are the
two great words of the Pauline gospel : " redemption,"
** atonement." By this time they have become wholly
theological terms, with their meaning confused by centuries
of dogmatic definition. " Redemption " was the process
by which a slave obtained his freedom. Thousands of
Jews taken prisoners in the wars had been sold into slavery
in the Roman dominions, and it was a popular work of
benevolence for wealthy Jews to " redeem " them into liberty.
That is the source of the metaphor. We shall therefore
do well to use the term " emancipation " as the nearest
equivalent of the Pauline expression. " Atonement "
is an old English word meaning the restoration of unity
("at-one") between persons who are estranged. In
Richtird II Shakespeare makes the king say to the rival
noblemen, Mowbray and Bolingbroke,

" Since we cannot atone you, we shall see
Justice design the victor's chivalry."

The secondary meanings which the word has acquired are
foreign to the language of Paul In the Authorized Version

54

THE ANCIENT WRONG 55

of the New Testament "atonement" is the translation
of a perfectly ordinary Greek word for the reconciliation
of estranged persons. Paul saw men divided into hostile
camps "biting and devouring one another." 1 Behind
that internecine strife he saw the hostility of men to God
their common Father. Get rid of the enmity toward God,
and the divisions of men may be overcome. " While we
were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death
of His Son " : " He is our peace, who made both one, and
broke down that dividing wall, our enmity."* "Reconcilia-
tion," then, of the estranged, "emancipation" of the
enslaved, are the cardinal points of Paul's Gospel.

We have now to ask, What is the enslaving force, and
what is the cause of the alienation ? To those questions,.
Paul gives one answer, Sin. That word too, however, he
used in a sense different from that in which it has come to be
used in modern theology and ethics. To understand his
view of sin we must make our way through some rather
tangled metaphysics.

Paul conceived reality in a dualistic way. There are
two planes of being, the one eternal, the other temporal ;
the one visible, the other invisible.3 The visible world is
in some sort a revelation of the invisible, but an imperfect
revelation, for it is entangled in a mesh of decay (" cor-
rupton "). Decay is, in fact, so inseparable a property of
the visible world that Paul gives us no other general term
for its material substance. He simply calls it " decay,'*
describing it by its most evident property rather than defining
it. Similarly, he describes the substance, if we may so call it,
of the invisible world as " splendour " (" glory "), and he
may have conceived it, with many Greek thinkers, as akin
to light and fire.

1 Gal. r. 15* * Rom. v. 10, Eph. ii. 14.

3 The antithesis of the two orders of being runs through I Cor.
xv. 40-50; cf. Rom. viii. 20-21, II Cor. iv. i6-v. 4,

56 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

The cosmical aspect of the question, however, is only
vaguely touched upon. It is only in man that Paul
shows us anything approaching a complete scheme of
the relations of the two planes. For man belongs, at
least potentially, to both. His bodily existence partakes of
the nature of the temporal and visible : " he wears the image
of the earthy." In him the visible substance is " flesh,"
material, and inevitably subject to decay. The flesh is
temporarily animated by the psyche (if we use the word
" soul " we are suggesting false implications), which is the
principle of conscious life, including even intellectual pro-
cesses, but not belonging to the heavenly or eternal order.
On the other hand is the " inner man," whose nature is
different. About the inner man in the non-Christian,
Paul is somewhat vague ; but it appears that the " reason "
by which God is known to all men, and the " heart " upon
which His law is written, partake of the nature of the
invisible and eternal world.4 The non-Christian is, however,
to Paul's mind an imperfect, immature specimen of Man.
It is in the Christian that we must study human nature
in its developed form. Here the inner man is definitely
described as "spirit" (pneuma as distinct from psyche).
Like " flesh," spirit is a continuum ; it is the form of being
of God Himself and of the risen and glorified Christ, but
it is also the -form of being of the believer's own " inner
man." Not that " spirit " is to be considered as if it were,
like "flesh," mere substance. It is essentially power,
energy, and as such is "life-giving" ("quickening").
" Spirit " is therefore not properly a term of individual
psychology. Every man, so far as he has attained to truly
mature life ? partakes both of flesh and of spirit.

The principle of individuality is the "organism" ("body.")
This does not mean to Paul the structure of bone, flesh,

4 II. Cor. iv. 16, cf. Rom. vii. 22-3 ; Rom. ii. 14-15, Col. i.
21, ii. 1 8, Eph. iv. 18, Phil, iv. 7.

THE ANCIENT WRONG 57

and blood to which we give the name of body. It is the
pure organic form which subsists through all changes of
material particles. The physical organ which I possess to-
day is different in all or most of its material particles from
that which I possessed eight years ago. In so far as it has
an organic identity and continuity it is my body none the
less. Thus for Paul the identity of the " organism " or
" body " was in nowise affected by any change in its sub-
stance. The " flesh " might pass away, and ** splendour "
or light-substance be substituted, and the organism remain
intact and self-identical. Thus Paul's insistence on the
resurrection of the " body " is meant to assert the continuity
of individual identity, as distinguished from the persistence
of some impalpable shade or " soul " which was not in any
real sense the identical man. Paul could not have talked
of " saving souls " ; it was the " emancipation of the
body" that interested him, i.e. of the individual, self-
identical, organic whole. The phrase in the Apostles'
Creed, " the resurrection of the flesh," would have horrified
him. He neither expected nor wished the " flesh " to rise
again ; he wished the " body " to be emancipated from the
bonds of the " flesh." 5 It is probably on this analogy that
we are meant to interpret the "emancipation of the
creation." It, too, has somehow a "body" which can
be redeemed from decay and clothed with splendour in
the eternal world. 6

The metaphysical distinction of two planes of being
does not precisely correspond to ethical distinctions. It is

5 I Cor. iv. 35-54, ii. 12-iii. 3, Gal. v. 17, Rom. viii. 12-13,
23, etc. I believe that the above is a fair description of Paul's
* anthropology.* But he is not a systematic theologian, and he
sometimes uses terms loosely. Sw/xa, ^v^j), Trvei/jua, all appear
at times in senses approximating more closely to their popular
or vulgar meaning than to the strict Pauline usage.

6 Rom. viii. 21.

5 8 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

often stated that Paul accepted a current view of his time,
that spirit alone is good and matter essentially evil. He did
not accept any such view. On the one hand there are
" spiritual forces of wickedness " ; 7 and on the other hand
what is wrong with the material world is not its moral
evil, but its subjection to the futility of a perpetual flux of
birth and decay. That subjection is traced not, as in some
contemporary theories, to the sin of Adam, for whose sake
the earth was believed to have been " cursed," but vaguely
to the will of God, i.e. it is in the nature of things as they
are, though not of necessity permanent. 8

In man, however, the case is complicated.. By some
means the " flesh " of mankind (which carries with it
the psych^) has fallen under the dominion of sin, thus
becoming not merely morally indifferent, though perish-
able matter, but " flesh of sin." This Sin is a
mysterious power, not native to man or to the material
world, but intruding into human nature on its lower
side* Paul speaks of it in personal terms : it lives,
reigns, holds us in slavery ; it is condemned and
overcome. Whether he was consciously personifying an
abstraction, or whether Sin was for him really a personal
power, like the Devil of popular mythology, is not clear.
At all events it is not an inherent taint in matter, but rather
one of the "spiritual forces of wickedness." 9

How Sin came into human nature is a question which
Paul does not answer very satisfactorily. He sometimes
traces it to an historic transgression of a human ancestor

7 EpL vi. 12, cf. Gal. IT. 3, 9, Col. ii. 8, 20 ; tie ' rulers of
this age ' who * crucified tie Lord of glory ' (I Cor. ii. 8) are
discarnate intelligences working behind the actions of men.

Angels ' are in Paul generally powers hostile to men's salvation,
Rom.viii.38, 1 Cor. vi. 3,ii.i o,II Cor.xii./, Gal. i. 8, Col. ii. 18.

8 Rom. viii. 20.

9 Rom. v. 12, 21, vi. 12, 14, 17-23, vii. 8-n, 20, viii. 3.

THE ANCIENT WRONG 59

in the remote past. This was the common account
given in contemporary Judaism. * But in other passages
he suggests a different origin. In the background of
his world stand the " world-rulers " or " elemental spirits."
They have some special relation to the material world,
and it does not appear that in relation to it they are necessarily
evil. But if man becomes subject to them, then he is fallen
to a state of unnatural slavery. The process appears to be
after this fashion : the reason of man, being a spark of the
divine, knew God and read His law written on the heart >
but instead of worshipping God and doing His will, it
stooped to adore material forms, and thereby fell under the
dominion of the elemental powers. The elevation of the
material to the place of God led to the perversion of man's
naturally right instincts. Reason itself became " reprobate "
and the whole life of mankind was thrown into disorder. 11
If the transmitted sin of Adam is the characteristically
Jewish doctrine, the theory of elemental spirits starts rather
from Greek ideas. Neither can satisfy us, though each has
hints of truth : on the one hand, the solidarity of humanity
and the incalculable effects of individual transgression ; on
the other, the peril of exalting the physical and material to a
dominance which is not in accord with man's real nature.

What might have been the relations of flesh and spirit
had not sin intervened is a question on which Paul does not
speculate. Taking things as they are, he scans history
and sees that everywhere the power of evil has degraded
man from the high estate he should hold, making even the
** inner man," the reason which knew God, the conscience
which witnessed to His law, slave to the material part and
sharer in its fate of decay and futility. In the " flesh " sin
has its seat. Reason may bow to the " flesh " and thereby
fall under the dominion of sin and decay, but its nature

10 Rom. v. 12-21, cf. IV Ezra. iii. 21-22, vii. 11-12,

11 Rom. i. 18-23, 28; cf. passages cited in note 7 above.

60 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

remains alien from sin. " Flesh," on the other hand, has
assimilated itself to the evil power, and the taint passes to
the psychi or " soul " of which it is the organ, so that " the
desires of the flesh and of the intellect " stand for the evil
tendency in man. "The Flesh" therefore, in a moral
sense, does not mean matter as evil in itself, but man's
emotional and intellectual nature as perverted by sin and
enslaved to material forces. 12

It will be evident from this that " sin " is not for Paul
identical with actual moral transgression of which the indi-
vidual is fully conscious and for which he is fully responsible.
That is the sense in which the word has been generally
used by subsequent writers 5 but if it is taken in that
sense, then Paul is inevitably misunderstood. The actual
Greek word used (hamartia\ like its equivalent in the
Hebrew of the Old Testament, originally meant " missing
the mark," or as we might say, " going wrong." Now
whatever subtleties may complicate the discussion of such
questions as moral responsibility and degrees of merit, at
least it is plain that there is something wrong with man-
kind. There is a racial, a corporate, a social wrongness
of which we are made in some sense partakers by the
mere feet of our being born into human society*
That is the meaning of "original sin," as the theo-
logians call it It is not the figment of an inherited
guilt > how could anything so individual as guilty responsi-
bility be inherited ? It is a corporate wrongness in which
we are involved by being men in this world. The
purport of Paul's rather clumsy metaphysics is to show how

Rom. vii. 14, 18, viii. 5-8, Gal. v, 13, 19-21, vi. 8, Col. ii.
13, 1 8, Eph. ii. 3. It has to be added that in many passages
Paul was ffap in an entirely non-moral sense as standing simply
for the physical part of man, e.g. Rom. ii. 3, Gal. iv. 13, Col. i.
22, etc. How easily the one sense passed into the other is shown
by a passage like II Cor. z. 2-4.

THE ANCIENT WRONG 61

the problem of evil in man is more than the problem of a
series of sinful acts, which of his own free will he can stop
if he makes up his mind to it. To some minds this dis-
tinction will seem artificial. They will agree with the
child who refused to repeat the prayer " God make me a
good girl," with the remark, " I wouldn't trouble God
about a little thing like that : I can be good by myself if
I want to." But a majority, perhaps, of those who take
life seriously find that the trouble lies deeper. There is a
deep-grained wrongness about human life as it is. The
preoccupation with that wrongness as the primary interest
of the religious life is certainly morbid ; but no matter how
freely and fully we recognize the wonderful potentialities of
that human nature which we share, it remains true that
there is a flaw somewhere, which defies simple treatment.
The monstrous development of the doctrine of "total de-
pravity" and the reaction against it, have partly blinded us
to the reality of what Paul called " sin in the flesh." That
blindness has been partly connected with a fuller appreciation
of individuality and individual responsibility than Paul had
attained. But have we not placed an exaggerated emphasis
upon individual responsibility ? And is not that partly
why the whole idea of sin (in the sense in which evangelical
theology has used the term) has seemed to be invalidated
by the modern re-discovery of solidarity, and the recognition
of the influence of heredity and social environment ? It
would indeed be difficult to say definitely of any particular
wrong act that its perpetrator was absolutely and exclu-
sively responsible for it. When we have said that, it
is often thought that the whole Christian doctrine of sin
is disproved. It does not touch that doctrine as taught by
Paul He thought of the "flesh," or lower nature of
man, as a continuum in which we all partake ; and of that
u flesh " as having acquired by some means an impulse
towards what is wrong. We should set aside his termi-

62 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

nology, and seek some other explanation of the fact ; but
on the fact we must surely agree with Paul, that there is
something common, something racial about sin in his sense
of the term. It is a tendency transmitted by heredity and
deepened by environment, and its issues, like its sources,
are not individual merely, but racial. No one of us can
disown his part in the complicated evils in which society
is entangled. We are wrong, and we need to be put
right. No casuistry explaining away the measure of in-
dividual responsibility makes much difference here : the
fact of wrongness remains. Our problem is Paul's problem.
Indeed, with the modern emphasis on solidarity, and our
rebelliousness against social evil in the world, the problem is
pressing on us with a peculiar urgency. Perhaps, therefore,
we may give ear afresh to a teacher out of that ancient
imperial world when he sets before us his thoughts upon
its solution. As we shall see, he finds the point of attack
upon this gigantic force of wrong in the individual, though
not in the individual as an isolated unit.

For the moment, however, we are concerned to pursue
the trail of corporate wrong. For it brings disastrous conse-
quences which also are corporate as well as individual.
Human history is a moral order, in which it is impossible
to be wrong without incurring disaster. This disaster
Paul calls, in traditional language, "The Wrath," or
much more rarely, "The Wrath of God." It has
been supposed that Paul thought of God as a vengeful
despot, angry with men whom nevertheless He had Himself
created with the liability to err, even if He did not create
them to be damned for His greater glory. That is a mere
caricature of Paul's view. There are, indeed, many
indications in his use of language that " The Wrath of
God" is not being thought of as a passion of anger
in the mind of God. It is not without significance
that there are no more than three or possibly four

THE ANCIENT WRONG 63

passages where the expression "The Wrath of God"
(or " His Wrath ") appears at all, while the phrase " The
Wrath " is constantly used in a curiously impersonal way
Paul carefully avoids ever making God the subject of the
verb " to be angry." Once he speaks of God as " applying
the Wrath " a strange way of saying that God made His
anger felt, if anger was thought of as a passion in the divine
mind. It suggests rather a process directed or controlled
by a person.^ Even in the passage which has about it most
of the sterner colours of Pharisaic theology the "vessels of
Wrath " are the objects of God's forbearance ; a statement
which, if it does not rule out the idea that God is angry
with the persons on whom at the same time He shows mercy,
at least gives a startling paradox if Paul is supposed to have
the thought of an angry God in mind. I 4

Let us, then, consider the one passage where "The
Wrath of God " is spoken of in more than an allusive
way. "The Wrath of God is being revealed," he
says to the Romans : it is to be seen at work in
contemporary history. How, then ? In earthquake, fire
and brimstone ? " God gave them up in the lusts of
their own hearts to impurity " ; 4C God gave them up
to disgraceful passions " 5 " God gave them up to their
reprobate reason." " The Wrath of God," therefore, as
seen in actual operation, consists in leaving sinful human
nature to "stew in its own juice." *5 This is a suffi-
ciently terrible conception, but if we believe, as Paul did,
in any measure of human free will, what else is to happen
if men choose steadfastly to ignore God ? Are they not
self-condemned to the reaping of the harvest of their

X 3 ('H) 'op??. (TOV) Qeov Rom. i. 1 8, CoL iiL 6, Eph. v. 6;
TJ opyrj Rom. iii. J, Y. 9, ix. 22 (possibly with avro/), rii. 19,
xiil. 5, I Thess. i. 10, ii. 16 ; opyji Rom. ii. 5, 8, ir. 15, ix. 22
(ffOKtvrj pyrjg), Eph. ii. 3, I Thess. v. 9.

*4 Rom. he. 22-23 *5 Rom. i. 18-32, xi* 8-10.

64 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

sinful deeds, which is " a reprobate reason " a disordered
moral being, where the very instincts that should have led
to good are perverted to the service of wrong ? " If the
light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness ! "
And this " reprobation," be it observed, is the consequence
of the rejection of that knowledge of God which is native
to man. "The Wrath," then, is revealed before our
eyes as the increasing horror of sin working out its hideous
kw of cause and effect. "The judgment" which over-
takes sin is the growing perversion of the whole moral
atmosphere of human society, which cannot but affect
to a greater or less degree every individual born into
it Meanwhile, the characteristic personal activity of
God is not wrath but "kindness," "long-suffering,"
rooted in His love and ready to display itself in
"grace."** That is why "The Wrath" is not the
last word of the moral order for Paul. The " wages of sin "
is real and terrible ; it is moral decay and death for the race.
But that is not a complete account of the moral universe.
" God justifies the ungodly." *7 To this matter we shall
presently turn. The intention of this chapter is to set forth
the problem of sin as Paul faced it, and to suggest how close
to reality he was when he placed his finger on the point
that sin is a racial and social fact, in which every
individual is implicated, and that if the moral order is
nothing more than a law of retribution, there is nothing
before sinful man but greater sin and moral disaster.^ &:
The whole of this is only preparatory to a decisive
declaration of the way out of apparently desperate conditions.
Even so, does it give too gloomy a view ? We like to think
that humanity left to itself would grow better. But would
it ? Is it not true that whole nations and societies of men
have sunk lower and lower out of sheer inner rottenness,

rf Rom.ii. 22-24, S- 4> *i. 32. 17 Rom. iv. 5,v. 6, vi. 23.
* See N. Micklem, The Of en Light (C.R.S.) ch. iii.

THE ANCIENT WRONG 65

often bringing other peoples down with them in their fell,
since there is a solidarity of mankind ? And is such a future
for our species as the ghastly imaginings of Mr. Wells's
" Time Machine " wholly inconceivable ? But Jesus
Christ, we are told, whom Paul professed to follow, took
no such gloomy view of human nature and its prospects.
It may be granted at once that there is a difference of
emphasis between the Master and His disciple. There was
a good reason for this, Jesus worked among the Jews,
where the dominant theology took a gloomy enough view
of the nature of all men except a very few. It was there-
fore His first and chief care to give hope to those who seemed
hopeless and to assure them of the glorious possibilities open
to them in the love of the Father in heaven. Paul worked
among the pagans, where real downright evil was readily
condoned and glozed over, and its inevitable consequences
explained away, while none the less the rottenness of sin
was eating into the heart of that corrupt civilization, despite
all the efforts of moralists and legislators. " The Wrath "
that follows sin was actually being revealed ; and it was
part of Paul's task to open the eyes of the pagan world to
it, that they might be willing to seek the better way. But
we cannot quote Jesus against Paul as giving an easy and
cheerfully optimistic view of the actual state of human
society. On the contrary, there is enough in His teaching
to show that He too saw the society of His day " rushing
down a steep place into the sea,'* with no hope of its redemp-
tion save in the " Sovereignty of God." J 9 Therein Paul
was His true interpreter to the wider world.

*9 SeeMt.vi.23=LLzi.35,Mt.v.i3==LLxiv. 34, cf. MLix.
50, ML iii. 29, cf. Mt. xii. 32=LL xii. 10, ML viii. 35, cf.
Mt. x. 39=LL xvii. 33, Mt. xxiii. 34-36=!^. xi. 49^51, Mt. xL
21 24~LL x. 13-15, LL xiii. 1-9, etc. The principle running
through all such sayings is that of the disastrous consequences
of wrong choice in a moral universe : cf. Gal. vi. 7. On the other
hand, the characteristic personal activity of God is illustrated in
the 'patient love of the Shepherd and the Father of the ProdigaL

5

CHAPTER VI
THE TYRANNY OF AN IDEA

WE have now to approach that region of our subject where
Paul's contribution is perhaps most original and charac-
teristic, and where at the same time it is most cumbered with
temporary elements : his treatment of the idea of Law.
The enormous importance which attached to that idea in
contemporary Judaism, and particularly in the Pharisaic
branch of it to which Paul belonged, has already been
indicated. Paul's attitude to the historic Law of Moses is
curiously contradictory on the surface. On the one hand
it reflects for him that inexorable moral order which is in
the nature of things. The nature of things is the will of
God, and the law which reflects it must be of God, and there-
fore holy, spiritual, just and good.* On the other hand
he detests this law as the supreme instrument of slavery (why,
we shall see presently). It is not unfair to regard this
deep paradox in his thought as the penalty of a false up-
bringing, which had implanted almost a morbid idfe fixe
that he never threw off. His training and prepossessions
made it for ever impossible for him to take a detached view
of the Law in which he had been taught to see the eternal
will of God. He might reasonably have attacked its mixing
upon equal terms of ritual trivialities and awful moral
principles. He did not do so. His training made it
impossible. The Law was a vast and indivisible system

x Rom. vii. 12, 14.

66

THE TYRANNY OF AN IDEA 67

which must somehow be accounted for as a whole. His
entire mental background made things peculiarly hard for
him at this point. But it was not without advantage that
Christian thought was thus led to face with the utmost
definition the conflict which underlay the attack that
Jesus Christ had made upon the organized religion of
His day.

The attitude of Jesus to the Jewish Law was singularly
free and unembarrassed. He made full use of it as an im-
pressive statement of high ethical ideals* Even its ritual
practices He treated with perfect tolerance where they did
not conflict with fundamental moral obligations. From
Pharisaic formalism He appealed to the relative simplicity
of the venerable written law. But again from the written
law itself He appealed to the basic rights and duties of
humanity : the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the
Sabbath \ the Law might permit the dissolution of marriage,
but there was something more deeply rooted in the nature
of things which forbade it ; the lex talionis^ the centra}
principle of legal justice, must go overboard in the interests
of the holy impulse to love your neighbour not merely as
yourself, but as God has loved you. Such free-handed
dealing meant that the whole notion of morality as a code
of rules with sanctions of reward and punishment was
abandoned. But the average Christian was slow to see
this implication. For instance, Jesus had taken fasting
out of the class of meritorious acts, and given it a place only
as the fitting and spontaneous expression of certain spiritual
states. This is what an early authoritative catechism of the
Church made of His teaching : " Let not your fasts be
with the hypocrites, for they fast on Monday and Thursday ;
ye therefore shall fast on Wednesday and Friday." a It
sounds ludicrous, but we may ask, Was it not on some very

Mk. ii. 18-20, Mt. vi. 16-18; Teaching of the Twelve
dpostles, viii, i.

68 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

similar principle that the Church did actually carry through
its reconstruction of " religious observance " ? And a
Church which so perverted Christ's treatment of the ritual
law proved itself almost equally incapable of understanding
His drastic revisio of the moral law.

It was therefore of the utmost importance that one
who knew from the inside the system which Jesus
attacked should, through being compelled to confront
his own exaggerated legalism with His Master's inde-
pendence, point the way to the more fundamental impli-
cations of what Jesus had done. Paul found himself
driven to reconsider, not this precept or that, but the
whole nature of law as such ; and it is a mark of his real
greatness that he did so on the basis, not of theory merely,
but of experience. In its elements, moreover, the experience
on which he founded was wider than that of a Pharisaic
Jew. For it is not of any peculiarly Jewish experience that
he speaks. For himself, no doubt, whether as Jew or as
Christian, the so-called Law of Moses was absolute law.
Within the sphere of law there was nothing higher or more
perfect. Yet the identical principle appeared also among the
pagans. The pagan sense of right and wrong was God's
law written on the heart the same law as that delivered on
Sinai, Paul would have said, though more doubtfully,
obscurely, and imperfectly revealed. He had sympathy
enough to perceive that the Stoic too must fell upon this
problem of a law which he could not but acknowledge as
divine, which yet condemned him without giving him
strength to do better. There are passages in Stoic writers
tinged with a melancholy which recalls the moving trans-
cript from Paul's experience in the seventh chapter of his
Epistle to the Romans. It is at bottom a human problem,
and not a specifically Jewish one, that he is facing, but his
own bitter experience in Pharisaic Judaism lent a cutting
edge to his analysis.

THE TYRANNY OF AN IDEA 69

The education of the youthful Paul in his Jewish home at
Tarsus must have been a very rigorous one. We may
compare it with the strictest kind of Puritan training which
in this country, and still more perhaps in Scotland and Wales,
moulded the lives of a former generation. He was early
drilled into a very high standard of personal purity and
probity. As he grew up he found that his food and
clothes, the way he washed his hands, the way he had his
hair cut, and all the simplest operations of a boy's daily life
were rigidly prescribed,3 and were so distinct from those of
other Tarsian boys that he was bound to ask, Why ? He
was told, Because the God of our fathers has commanded
it in His law, as He has also commanded us not to kill or
steal ; and if we do otherwise, the wrath of God will come
upon us. So he came to think of this God as very strong
and holy, but also very stern and jealous. He was a merci-
ful God too, but His mercy was chiefly shown in the in estim-
able gift of the Law to Israel, His darling people. 4 Through
that gift they knew, and only they, the eternal rule of life
by which alone happiness could be attained. " See, I set
before you this day a blessing and a curse " : so the young
Paul learned to recite out of Deuteronomy. To know the
Law and keep it in its entirety was the assured way to perfect
blessedness. To infringe the least of its precepts was to
bring down the vengeance of a justly incensed God, "an eye
for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." Such was the eternal

3 Deut. :riv. 3-21, nii. 1112, Lev. xir. 27, Mt. vii. 3-4*

4 See especially the saying of Rabbi Akiba (died 135 A.D.)
in Pirke Aboth, iii. 19 :" Beloved are Israel, in that to them was
given the precious instrument wherewith the world was created.
Greater love was it that it was known to them that there was
given to them the precious instrument wherewith the world was
created, as it is said, * For a good doctrine I have given you ; for-
sake not my Torah (Law)'" (translation by Herford). Cf.
Psalm cilvii. 19-20, czk. 89-96, kxviii. 1-7, and Rabbinic
passages cited by Weber, of. tit. pp. 18-25.

7 o THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

justice, which God must vindicate, because He was God.5
And the Law itself in all its precepts was a pattern for
human life framed upon this eternal justice, with its root
principle of reciprocity or retribution. This Law had been
given, in the inscrutable providence of God, to His chosen
people as the supreme mark of His favour.

So Paul was taught at home ; and as he looked upon the
Greek boys he passed in the street, he was proud to think
that he had a secret denied to them all he knew the Law
Its possession undoubtedly brought to an earnest-minded
Jew a real moral elevation. Such writings as the hundred-
and-nineteenth Psalm show with what enthusiasm a pious
Jew could contemplate this great gift of God to his race.
4S> Oh, how I love Thy law ! It is my meditation all the day."
We may think of Paul as sharing in such emotions in his
study of the Law, especially from the time when, aiming
at the Rabbinate, he devoted himself wholly to it* Out of
this concentration upon the Law grew on the one side an
intense national pride, on the other an overwhelming sense
of the moral order with its awful principle of retribution.
Both were affronted by the discovery in Palestine, when he
went there, of those renegade Jews the Nazarenes, whose
leader had set himself up against the Law and denounced
its authorized interpreters, and had at last been cast out of
the commonwealth of Israel for blasphemy against God's
Temple and His Holy Name. It was a grim enthusiasm
for the moral order which made Paul a persecutor, as it has

5 " According to the Jewish mind, requital was deeply ingrained
in the whole scheme of things. Exceptions there might be, but
they were more apparent than real. The most solemn and the
most true adage in the world was * measure for measure.* * All
measures shall pass away, but measure for measure shall never
pass away.' The Rabbinic uses of the word Middah, Measure,
Attribute, Quality, form a chapter in themselves*" C. G,
Montefiore in Beginnings of Christianity, ed. Jackson & Lake,

55-

THE TYRANNY OF AN IDEA 71

made many another. " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou
Me ? " Paul might have thought he had his answer ready :
"Because the moral order must be vindicated and the
law-breaker punished.'* Yet when the question was
actually pressed home he found he had no answer.

For while outwardly Paul was the proud, irreproachable
champion of the Law, inward struggles plunged his soul in
darkness and confusion. The weakness of his human
nature had revealed itself in conflict with the absolute claims
of the moral law. The sense of impotence and despair
that took hold upon him is reflected in one of the most
moving passages of his writings, the seventh chapter of the
Epistle to the Romans. It is not without significance that
the example he there uses to illustrate his point is the one
commandment in the Decalogue which is concerned with
thought and not with overt word or act. " Thou shalt
not covet," said the Law. We may recall that covetous-
ness is noted in the Gospels as a special snare of the
pious Pharisee. From his Pharisaic days Paul was well
aware that morality must cover the inner life of feeling,
thought, motive, and desire. " He is not a Jew who is such
only outwardly " 6 is a sentence he might have written at
any time in his life. Now, it appears, he found that even
though he might conform his outward actions to the require-
ments of the Law he could not control his thoughts and
desires. But the Law was a single whole ; to break one
precept was to renounce all. 7 He was as honest and strict
with himself as he was severe with others, and he fell under
the scourge of self-condemnation. He loved the Law,.
consented to it as good, rejoiced in it " after the inner man,"
as he says, but he could not keep it " The good I would,

Rom. ii. 28-29.

7 Gal. iii. lo-ii. Several Rabbinic sayings to this effect
are quoted in Wetstein's note on Ja. ii. 10, which is an early and
unambiguous statement of the principle.

72 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

I do not, and the evil I would not, that I do . . when I
would do good, evil is present with me."

It is at this point that Paul's experience as a Pharisee
falls in with the common experience of men. It was
not a Jew who wrote " Video mellora proboque^ deteriora
sequor" The moral incompetence of human nature
in the presence of an acknowledged ideal is no private
discovery. A man may perceive the ideal clearly, and
contemplate it with a keen aesthetic delight, and yet
desires and impulses which contradict it may be so much
more real to him that his actual conduct is a perpetual denial
of the ideal. This divided state of the personality is a state
of miserable impotence, in which the freedom of the will
is a mere illusion. " The freedom of the will," writes a
modern psychologist, 8 "may be a doctrine which holds true
of the healthy, and indeed the exercise of will and determina-
tion is the normal way in which to summon the resources of
power ; but the doctrine that the will alone is the way to
power is a most woebegone theory for the relief of the
morally sick and who of us is whole ? Freedom to
choose ? Yes ! But what if, when we choose, we have
no power to perform ? We open the sluice-gates, but the
channels are dry ; we pull the lever, but nothing happens ;
we try by our will to summon up our strength, but no strength
comes." , No wonder Paul described such a condition as
a state of slavery.

Most of us know something about this condition, though
few of us are reduced to the depths of despair to which
Paul came. We pacify a not very exacting con-
science with a rough approximation. But the ques-
tion may be raised, whether this half-conscious tolerance
of a real though unacknowledged rift between ideal and
practice is not a form of "suppressed complex" which
works more injury than we commonly imagine. Worse

* J. A. Hadfield, in The Spirit (ed. B. H. Streeter), p. 87,

THE TYRANNY OF AN IDEA 73

certainly is the state of the person who is sentimental enough
to think that to admire what is noble is a sufficient sub-
stitute for doing it. Worst of all is the actual hypocrisy
of pretending to ourselves that by great rigour in practices
we find easy we can tip the balance even, and

" Compound for sins that we're inclined to
By damning those we have no mind to."

Such hypocrisy is often a form of instinctive self-protection,
and it is most common where moral ideals have been reduced
to the most precise and comprehensive rules of life. That
is probably why the Puritan of literature is so often a hypo-
crite, and likewise the Pharisee of the Gospels, whose
religion was discipline pressed to an even more logical
extreme. Paul was not that kind of Pharisee. He was
earnest, clear-sighted, and absolutely honest with himself.
He could find no way out of the impasse. He could not
keep the Law, especially in its most inward and spiritual
precepts, which sought to rule the thoughts and motives.
But law must be upheld. It was in the nature of things,
and God must needs vindicate it. Where then was any
door of hope for Paul the sinner ?

We now come to the turning-point in Paul's careen He
set out for Damascus, the fierce avenger of an outraged Law 5
but in his heart he felt that the Law had broken him, and
hope was almost gone. "Who will rescue me from the
clutch of' this dead body ? " is his bitter cry. . . . Time
passes, and we meet a new Paul. The terror of the Law
has passed from his soul, with all the miserable sense of moral
impotence : " There is now no condemnation " ; "I can
do anything in Him who gives me strength." And he has
now no further thought of inflicting the terrors of the Law
upon others. He who once "breathed out threatenings
and slaughter " is now content if he may bear his share of
the sufferings by which others may be saved : " I am glad of

74 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

my sufferings for you ; I am making up in my own flesh
the deficit of Christ's sufferings for His Body, which is the
Community " ; " I am crucified with Christ." 9 What we
observe in all this is that the preoccupation with law, and
more precisely with its principle of retribution, has slipped
away ; and in the freedom and peace of mind that ensues
Paul has gained the " heart at leisure from itself" and open
to all tides of human sympathy. He has discovered some
new secret of life. What is it ?

" God who said * Light shall flash out of darkness *
flashed upon our hearts and enlightened us with a knowledge
of the splendour of God in the face of Christ" I0 It was a
new perception of God that had come to Paul. The God
of Pharisaism was like the God of the Deists, He stood
aloof from the world He had made, and let law take its
course. He did not here and now deal with individual
sinful men, Paul lets us see how new and wonderful was
the experience, when God "flashed on his heart" in personal
dealing with him. He had not suspected that God was
like that His theological studies had told him that God
was loving and merciful ; but he had thought this love and
mercy were expressed once and for all in the arrangements
He had made for Israel's blessedness * 4 the plan of salvation."
It was a new thing to be assured by an inward experience
admitting of no further question that God loved him, and
that the eternal mercy was a Father's free forgiveness of His
erring child. This was the experience that Christ had
brought him : he had seen the splendour of God's own love
in the face of " the Son of God, who loved me and gave Him-
self for me." Il What knowledge of Jesus Christ and His
teaching lay behind the flash of enlightenment it is now im-
possible for us to say ; but it is clear that the God whom Paul
met was the ** Father " of Jesus' own Gospel parables, the

9 Rom. viii. 1-2, Phil. iv. 13, Col. i. 24, Gal. ii. 19, vi. 14.

10 II Cor. iv. 6. " Gal. 2. 19-20.

THE TYRANNY OF AN IDEA 75

"Shepherd" who goes after the one sheep until He finds it
It was the God, in fact, whom the whole of the life of Jesus
set forth, to the astonishment of those among whom He
moved. Living still. He brought God to men in the same
unmistakable way. The divine love that through Jesus
had found Zacchaeus the publican had now through the
risen Jesus found Paul the Pharisee. Henceforward
the central facts of life for Paul were that while he was yet
a sinner God had found and forgiven him, and that this was
the work of Jesus Christ in whose love the love of God ,
had become plain. About those two foci in experience his
theology revolves, 12

In order to establish against those who impugned it the
validity of his new experience of God, Paul set out to dis-
cover in what were to him and to his critics indisputable
facts, the proof of his assertion. The interest of these
discussions for us is limited to the extent to which they
illuminate on various sides the new conception of God and
His dealings which had come to Paul in experience. His
argument comes to this, that while the Law had a pkce of
its own in the providential order, it never did and never
could exhaust the whole truth about God and man. Law
worked wholly within the sphere of reciprocity or recom-
pense. But history showed that such reciprocity was at
least very irregular and incomplete in its operation. In the
first place, his critics must grant that in God's dealings with
the ancestors of the " chosen people " there was an element
of free choice on God's part, altogether out of relation to
the deserts of the objects of that choice. Abraham was
called even before he had taken upon him the rite of
circumcision. Jacob was loved by God, as the Scripture
showed, before he had done either good or ill. That
indicated a freedom of choice on God's part which was

Rom. v. 6-8, viii. 35-39, ^ Cor. r * H- 1 ?* 18-19, Col. i.
13-15, Eph. i. 4-7, ii. 4-10, iii. 18-19, v. 1-2,

76 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

incompatible with the strict working of law, 13 Such freedom
of choice, however, raises a new difficulty the case of the
"rejects." They are left in sin, and must on the principles
of law pay the inexorable penalty of sin in ever greater
and greater sin until complete moral disaster and death is
the result. But what actually happens ? " What if God,
with all His will to exhibit His wrath and make known
His power, bore very patiently with * vessels of wrath,' fit
only for destruction ? " I4 There is a flaw, that is, in the
working of the system of recompense. <c In this, O Lord,"
exclaims a contemporary Pharisaic writer, "shall Thy
righteousness and goodness be declared, if Thou wilt com-
passionate them that have no wealth of good works." I5
The writer of these words is dearly very uncertain
whether God's compassion does actually reach so far.
Paul, like most Pharisees, is sure that in all ages a
remnant at least has found unmerited mercy of God,
even though His normal principle was retribution. In
other words, forgiveness is, and always has been, a fact
verifiable in the experience of some men at least. But it
is wholly inconsistent with the law of retribution. " Do
you make light," Paul wrote, "of the wealth of His
kindness and tolerance and patience ? Do you not know
that the kindness of God is trying to lead you to
repentance ? " l6 In practice, that is to say, the Law as an
absolute system of recompense has wrecked itself upon the
character of God as loving and pitiful But this very fact
that God has passed over, or ** winked at," sin in spite of

*3 Gal. iii. 7-22, iv. 21-31, Rom. iv., ix. 7-13.

T 4 Rom. ix. 22.

J 5 IV Ezra (II Esdras) viii. 31-36, but contrast 37-62; cf.
id. vii. 4.7-61, viii. 1-3, ix. 15, 21-22, x. 10 ; vii. 68, 133. The
date is about A.D. 100 ; but surely it was out of some such position
as this that Paul advanced into Christianity.

16 Rom. ii. 4.

THE TYRANNY OF AN IDEA 77

the Law, indicates the logical necessity for some different
principle to be disclosed. 17

Next, and arguing still from facts which would be
admitted by his Pharisaic opponents to facts which they
were attempting to deny, Paul showed that within the Jewish
system itself a principle different from the legal principle
was to be found. This seems so obvious to us, to whom
the prophetic element is the heart of the Old Testament,
as hardly to need labouring. But to the Pharisees the Law
was the foundation of all, the prophets merely commentary.
In effect, Paul challenged them to interpret the Law by the
prophets, and to find, even in the books of the Law itself,
statements suggesting a personal relation to God over and
abo\*e the merely legal relation to Him as governor of the
universe. In effect he says to his critics, "You cannot
find a place for these sayings : / can/* And so he shows
that the Christian revelation of God is the fulfilment of a
logical necessity in the heart of the old religion. 18

But further, the system of legal retribution was fitted,
Paul argued, to exhibit God's wrath, but not, in the full
sense, His righteousness* That is a startling statement
addressed to any Jewish public of the first century or for
that matter to the bulk of " Christian " opinion to-day.
Yet it was a thought not unfamiliar to the prophets,
that God's righteousness is shown in making His people
righteous. 19 God must show Himself, says Paul, at once
"just and justifier." 20 For all the scholastic language^

*7 Rom. iii. 25, cf. Ac- xvii. 30.

18 Rom. x., iv. 3-8, Gal. iii. 11-12, 1 Cor. r. 4, c II Cor* U
4-18.

19 See especially Is. xfr. 8-25, Iv. 6-13, Ivi. I, Ixi. 10-11,
Jer. xxiiL 5-6, xxxiii. 15-16, cf. Dan. ix. 16. The idea is sug-
gested, but scarcely adopted, in IV Ezra viii. 36.

2 Rom. iii. 26, cf. i. 16-17, with 1 8 sqq., setting the problem
which is solved in iii. 21 sqq.

78 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

there is here a very vital truth : that righteousness, or justice,
is a bigger thing than mere reciprocity. 21 It is the point which
Jesus Christ made when He drily observed that a man's field
gets sun and rain whether he has deserved these good things
or not, and when He likened God to an employer so lost
to all sense of justice as to pay a day's wage for an hour's
work. 22 God must, by an inner necessity of His nature,
do good to men : His " property is to have mercy and to
forgive." But within the sphere of law there is no place
for forgiveness. If righteousness or justice is retribution,
as law assumes, then forgiveness is unrighteous. Once
more there is a logical necessity for the revektion of
something other than law.

The real dilemma, therefore, which Paul places before
his opponents is this : If you are once agreed that the ethical
is the basis of all relation of God to man, then you are bound
to deal with the moral kw of retribution. It appears to be
the very foundation of morality, and yet it conflicts with the
religious instinct which says, " God is not like that." Until
you can clear scores with the principle of retribution, you
will be haunted by it in all your attempts to give play to
the grace of God. As we have seen, some of Paul's Jewish
compatriots, even of his fellow-Pharisees, found themselves
able in some measure to hold to the legal principle and
yet to find a " little door '* for the grace of God. But if
you are taking morality seriously, this position cannot be
stable, and indeed Christianity itself, foiling to understand
or follow Paul, has given proof how if you persist in identify-
ing righteousness with retributive justice, and then insist
that God must be righteous or just before He is merciful,
you cannot let the character of God have that effective
power in the religious and moral life which belongs to it.
Yet law serves a purpose. After all, the moral order of

21 See Norman Robinso v n, Christian Justice, in this series.
Mt. v. 45, xi, 1-16*

THE TYRANNY OF AN IDEA 79

retribution which it embodies is a real fact, though it is not
the only relevant fact, nor the final and decisive fact. If
Paul had worked with the idea of development or " evolu-
tion," he might have explained the place of law as a necessary
stage in that development. Indeed he comes very near to
doing so. " The Law/* he says, " was our * pedagogue,'
until Christ should come." Those words have been inter-
preted as though they described the Law as a preparatory
education, continued at a higher stage by Christ That,
however, is not quite what Paul meant. The " pedagogue "
in Greek society was not a " schoolmaster." He did not
give lessons (at least that was not his natural function). He
was a slave who accompanied a boy to school, and both
waited upon him and also exercised a supervision which
interfered with the boy's freedom of action. He is, in fact, a
figure in the little allegory which Paul gives us to illustrate
the position of the People of God before Christ came. There
was a boy left heir to a great estate. He was a minor, and
so must have guardians and trustees. He was as helpless
in their hands as if he had been a slave. He must live on
the allowance they gave him, and follow their wishes from
day to day. They gave him a " pedagogue " to keep him
out of mischief. He could not please himself, or realize
his own purposes and ambitions. Yet all the time he was
the heir 5 the estate was his and no one else's. Just so the
People of God, the Divine Commonwealth, was cramped
and fettered by ignorance and evil times. It remained in
uneasy expectation of one day coming into active existence*
At last the heir came of age : guardians and trustees
abdicated their powers, and the grown man possessed in full
realization all that was his. So now the fettered life of
the Divine Commonwealth bursts its bonds and comes into
active existence.

The Law therefore appears as a necessary but transi-
tory stage of discipline. It was not fundamental to God's

80 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

dealings with His sons. In the same passage Paul points
out, in his scholastic fashion, that historically the Law came
four hundred years after the " promise " had been given to
" faithful Abraham " ; and the " testament " by which
God devised His blessing upon Abraham could not be
reversed by a codicil added four hundred years later ! *3 In
other words, the intervention of law was not a reversal of
God's original and eternal purpose of pure love and grace
towards men ; it only subserved that purpose, while it
seemed to contradict it, just as the presence of the " peda-
gogue " might seem to the high-spirited young heir quite
contrary to the rights secured to him by his father's will.
How then did the Law subserve the purpose realized in
Christ ? Paulas answer is so startling that his commentators
have been reluctant to take his words in their plain mean-
ing. " The Law," he says, " came in, by a side wind, in
order that there might be more transgression ! " *4 If Paul
often talked like that, we can understand how he shocked
the good folk at Jerusalem, Jews and Christians alike !
Yet there is no great difficulty in resolving the paradox.
The Law came in, not to increase " sin," of course, but to
increase transgression. We have seen that for Paul ** sin "
is a state of the Race, in which things have gone wrong,
quite apart from any consideration of a conscious or deliberate
wrongdoing on the part of any individual. " Before law
came, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed where
there is no law." *5 The knowledge of the moral law con*
fronts the sinful state with a rule of goodness, and by the
contrast brings home the wrong to the conscience as guilt.
An examination of the seventh chapter of Romans makes
this dear. We have already treated that chapter as an
index to Paul's state of mind just before his conversion.
But the passage is ideal biography rather than a strict tran-

3 3 Gal. iii. ij-iv. 7. *4 Rom. v. 20, cf. Gal. Si. 19.

*5 Rom- r. 1-1+.

THE TYRANNY OF AN IDEA 81

script " from the life." It starts with the description of an
" age of innocence," which for the individual as for the
race is an inference of reason or a figment of the imagination
rather than strict history. There never was a time when
Paul, or when the human race, was self-conscious without
also being in some rudimentary way conscious of moral
obligation. Yet by comparison with later stages we may
use as a working concept the notion of an " age of innocence."
By that is meant, not that one did no wrong, but that one
had no sense of any contrast between what one actually
did and what one ought to have done. " Once I lived my
own life, without any law," Paul puts it. But while that
stage remained there was no chance of better things. The
establishment of a clear distinction between right and wrong
was essential. Yet it is probably true that in every normal
case this distinction emerged in conscience as the sense of
having done wrong, the sense of guilt or shame, essentially
humiliating and painful. "Law came to life and I
died," Then follows the phase of struggle and defeat, with
which we have already dealt.

It is necessary here to distinguish between two counts
which Paul brings against law. He found that the
knowledge that a thing was wrong provoked him to
seek it, so that to that degree law actually increased
u sin" The fact is sufficiently attested in proverbial
lore " stolen fruits are pleasant ! " to stand as a wide-
spread experience. But it is not so important or perhaps
so universal as Paul seems to have thought ; or at least it is
scarcely so important universally as it appears to have been
for him. In any case it rather obscures his main point, which
is this : Every individual of the human race is so entangled
in the general * c wrongness " that he has no power, left to
himself, to avoid committing constantly acts which, whether
he knows it or not, add to the sum of the wrong. To know-
that these acts arc wrong does not prevent him from doing

6

82 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

them, for ** the law is weak through the flesh " ; ** but it
does imprint upon his conscience in the indelible characters
of shame and guilt the contrast of good and evil. It brings
u sin " home, from being a general state of the human race,
to be a conscious burden upon the mind of the individual.
It is no longer "sin " merely ; it is " transgression."

We may compare the condition which Aristotle describes as
tk incontinence/' 2 7 the essence of which is that the individual
now knows, as he did not at a lower stage, that the things
he is doing are wrong, and yet cannot keep himself from
them* Aristotle makes this state the natural approach
to the next higher, that of u continence," in which the
things known to be wrong are through struggle and effort
gradually discarded. Similarly, Paul sees that it is a great
advance to have discovered sin in one's own heart as guilt.
Only the man who is conscious of his guilt can be saved
from the sin of which he is guilty. Only as the individual
acknowledges such guilt can the racial wrongness be suc-
cessfully attacked. In this sense, the function of law as
" increasing guilt " can be regarded as part of a beneficent
divine plan. But only if there is something else to follow.
Otherwise we may give up all hope. Paul's charge against
the Judaism in which he was brought up was that its
view of the world went no further than the merely legal
stage. Perhaps his statement of the case was sometimes
too sweeping. Surely he would have admitted that at all
times it was possible even within Judaism for men to
transcend the purely legal attitude, and that as a matter
of fact many saints of the old order had done so.
This is, indeed, implied in his references to Elijah's
Seven Thousand and Isaiah's Remnant. But in the
main the highest moralists of his time did actually
see no further than a system which attempted to build

^ Rom. viii. 3, cf. IV* Ezra iii. 20-22.

*7 'AKpavia : see Nlcomackean Ethics, VII. 1*1 0.

THE TYRANNY OF AN IDEA 83

the moral life of man exclusively upon that principle of
reciprocity which they discerned in the nature of things,
and allowed no real place for a fresh, direct, personal act of
the loving, gracious God whom yet they professed to worship.
Paul held that this God had indeed framed a universe in
which the principle of retribution was at work : for he
never denied that the Law largely answered to real facts,
and certainly he never doubted that evil is ultimately
disastrous and good ultimately blessed. The conception
of a right which should be defeated at the end of the day
did not dawn upon his mind : that was left for Mr. Bertrand
Russell But this whole universe, with all its complex
reactions, he held to have been constituted by God to the
end that through it man might rise to a higher order, that
of the " sons of God." At that point the " pedagogue "
must step aside, and God's heir claim his freedom.

CHAPTER VII
THE SOX OF GOD

"WHAT the law could not do, because it was powerless
through our lower nature, that God did, by sending His
own Son." i From what has already been said it should
be clear that the problem before Paul was not * How can a
just God forgive sin ? ' but * Granted that God is by His
nature both "just and justifier," i.e. that because He is
righteous He must forgive sin and impart righteousness,
how is that righteousness to be made available for man ? *
It is therefore not a problem of the adjustment of abstract
principles of justice and mercy, but of the relations of God
and man on the personal plane. Man must discover him-
self as a son of God. With this in view, " When the full
time had arrived, God sent out His Son, born of a woman,
born in subjection to law, in order that He might emancipate
those who were subject to law, i.e. that we might receive
adoption into sonship." 3

It is not here proposed to attempt any discussion in detail
of what is called the " Christology " of Paul. It is a highly
speculative structure of thought, making use of a difficult
philosophical vocabulary. As a philosophy it is compounded
of various elements, not easily disentangled. First, already
in pre-Christian times there was a highly elaborated body
of Jewish doctrine concerning the Messiah. Implying
at one time no more than an ideal Hebrew prince of

1 Rom. viii. 3. * Gal. iv. 45.

THE SON OF GOD 85

the dynasty of David, the conception had attracted to itsel
some of the most mystical elements in Jewish religious
thought. At the beginning of the Christian era the
Messiah was widely thought of as an eternal Being, called
" The Son of Man," or " The Man," as though He were the
type or representative of humanity, abiding with God from
all eternity, partly revealed in vision and mystical experience
to saints of all ages, such as Enoch and Ezra, but des-
tined "in the fulness of time" to be openly mani-
fested for the consummation of human history.3 It may
now be taken as certain that Jesus believed Himself to
be Messiah, and shaped His life and went to His death in
that conviction. The only question is to what extent He
shared various forms of contemporary belief about the
Messiah, and in what ways He re-shaped the idea. It
seems at least highly probable that He was the first to link
the thought of the Messiah with that of the ideal " Servant
of Jehovah " in the prophecies of the " Second Isaiah "
the Servant who would suffer and die that others might
know God. Without further discussion, it will be plain
that Paul was from the outset within the sphere of Messianic
ideas, both in their traditional form in Pharisaic Judaism,
and in the form in which from the life and teaching of Jesus
they had passed into early Christian circles.

Further, Messianic beliefs had already, to some degree,
become fused in certain types of Jewish thought with the
idea of the "Wisdom" of God, by which He made
the world, and by which He reveals Himself to man. And
this in turn had been brought in contact with the Greek
doctrine of the " Logos " or eternal Reason the rational
order of the universe, and the divine spark in man. Although
Paul never actually identifies Christ with the " Logos," as

3 See especially The Book of Enoch (in Charles' Apocrypha
and Pstudcpigrapha), and IV Ezra (=11 Esdras in the English
Apocrypha)*

86 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

the author of the Fourth Gospel does, yet in his attempt to
understand the position of Christ in relation to man and his
world he owes much to Logos speculation ; and he does
call Christ " The Wisdom of God, 1 ' in so many words. 4

In the world outside Judaism, the most living religions of
the time generally centred in faith in a u Saviour-God," who
was often believed to have lived, died, and risen again, and
with whom the believer could win fellowship through
certain rites. These were the so-called " mystery-religions."
Their origins were various, their rites were sometimes
wild and licentious, and in most the superstitions of magic
and astrology played a part ; but at best their offer of fellow-
ship with a Saviour-God ministered to a real religious need
of the time. The view has been put forward that Paul
reacted from Judaism practically to a mystery-religion of
the ordinary type, with Jesus Christ as its mythical Saviour-
God. One need not be committed to any such paradoxical
opinion, if one holds that he was influenced both in thought
and language by these cults probably not from personal
knowledge, but because that sort of thing was " in the air "
of the religious world at the t'me. His audience in the
pagan world had not the background of Judaism. It did
not know what he was talking about when he spoke of
" the Christ " (" Messiah ") ; but when he spoke of " the
Lord, the Saviour," the phrase at least conveyed some idea
to their minds. Their highest religious experience had
hitherto been associated with language of that kind, and it
expressed an idea which could be filled in from the abundant
material supplied by Christian experience and by the life
and teaching of Jesus Himself. The Christian missionary
in India, say, to-day, follows a not very different plan.

From such sources are the terms of Paul's " Chris-
tology" derived. But it cannot be too emphatically

* I Cor. i. 24, 30. Tiie ' Wisdom ' idea is best represented
by the books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus in the English Apocrypha.

THE SON OF GOD 87

repeated that the thing he is talking about in these terms
is not a speculative idea, but a piece of real experience.
That he had met Christ face to face he never doubted ; it
was a part of his actual history. " It pleased God to reveal
His Son in me " ; " last of all. He was seen of me also " ;
" henceforth I am alive, and yet not I, but Christ is alive
in me ; and the life which I now live under phvsical con-
ditions I live by virtue of my trust in the Son of God, who
loved me and gave Himself for me." 5 This is the authentic
language of personal experience. Mr. H. G. Wells has
told us that what he means by " God " has a close
resemblance to what Paul meant by " Christ." 6 He
is so far right that each of these men is telling us
of a personal meeting with an unseen Friend and
Leader, who is known at once, intuitively, to be the
Leader of humanity, and the Friend of all who have
yielded themselves to the divine call sounding in the heart
of man. So far as one can judge, the chief specific differ-
ences in the experience of the two men are that Paul's
" Christ " bears the definite ethical lineaments of the his-
toric Jesus, and that, unlike Mr. Wells's "Invisible King,"
He has a real and intimate relation to the whole universe
and its Creator. He is, in fact, the " Son of God " the
eternal type of all the relationship between personal beings
and the personal Centre of reality. What Paul saw in the
vision that changed his life was " the splendour of God in
the face of Christ." The Christ he met is the " Wisdom
of God " by which the worlds were framed that is, as we
might put it, the ultimate meaning of all reality is no other
than the meaning of the life and character of Christ. But,
like the ** Invisible King," Paul's Christ has had a history
entwined with the history of man. Man was made " in

5 Gal. i. 15-16, ii. 19-20, 1 Cor. ix. i, iv. 4-8, cf. II Cor. iv.
6, xii. 1-9.

6 God the Invisible King, p. 6, cf. pp. ziii-xiv.

88 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

the image of God " : that " image '' of God is Christ.7
There is in men a life derived from their natural progenitor,
whom Paul calls by the Hebrew word for man, " Adam."
But there is in men also a higher life, by which they are
linked with God and the eternal order. " The first man
Adam became a living psy:hs^ the last Adam, a life-giving
Spirit. . . . The first man is earthy, of clay ; the second
Man is from heaven." This second Adam or heavenly
Man-in-men is Christ. 8 The people of God in their ancient
pilgrimage " drank of the spiritual rock that followed them,
and that rock is Christ "; 9 or, as we might put it, the per-
petual springs of the spiritual life of the Race are found in
Him.

If we now recall what was said above of the dealings
of God in history for the founding of the Divine Common-
wealth, we shall see that in Paul's view every step in that
direction was in some sense an act of Christ within humanity
And every such step led forward to some decisive act in
which what was before obscure and halting should become
definite and effective. Then at last "in the fulness of
time," Christ came. By a gracious act of God, His Son
was " sent forth " ; or, to put the same thing in another
way 5 by His own act of will, in absolute unity with the pur-
pose of His Father, " He made Himself of no consequence,
accepted the standing of a slave, and was born in human
form ; and so, presenting the appearance of a man, He
stooped to a subordinate position, and persevered in it till
death a death on the gallows ! " In other words, He
who is always and everywhere the Man-in-men became a
man^ a Jew, a crucified criminal. I0

So stated, the thought is by admission a difficult
one. But there are certain points which need to be

7 II Cor. iv, 4, Col. L 13-19, cf. I Cor. viii. 6.

8 I Cor. iv. 45-49, cf. II Cor. iii. 17. 9 I Cor. x. 4.

10 Gal. iv. 4, Rom. i. 3, viii. 3, II Cor. viii. 9, Phil. ii. 6-8.

THE SON OF GOD 89

observed. The question in Paul's mind is not a ques-
tion of the scarcely thinkable combination in one person
of the contradictory attributes of transcendent Deity on
the one hand and of a purely " natural " and non-divine
humanity on the other. Humanity itself means Christ,
and has no proper meaning without Him. Unless a man
is a " son of God," he is so far less than man : he has yet
to grow " to a mature man, i.e. to the measure of the full
stature of Christ." The history of man is the story of
the course by which mankind is becoming fully human. The
controlling Mind in this history the " life-giving Spirit "
of the whole process Paul conceives as a real personality,
standing already in that relation to God in which alone
man is fully human ; already, and eternally, Son of God.
The emphasis, implied in Paul's teaching, upon the abso-
lute importance of the entry of this Son of God into human
history as an individual may be regarded as a part of the
general movement of thought by which during these
centuries the individual was for the first time being dis-
covered, simultaneously with the transition from national
or tribal to universal conceptions of human history. In
the centre of this movement stands the personality of Jesus
Christ, intensely individual, and yet wonderfully universal
an individual who consciously gathered up in His hands the
threads of history, and who has proved Himself through
following ages to have a direct affinity with the most diverse
types of man in all peoples. We can yet discern in Him
a continuity with the universal higher impulses of humanity,
and a personal command of men who are brought in touch
with Him; and these are essentially the facts lying at the
base of Paul's conception of the Son of God who became a
man ** in the fulness of time." To this, however, we have
to add, what we shall presently consider, the definite
achievement which Paul saw to have issued from the life
11 Eph. iv. 12-15.

9 o THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

and death of Jesus, and which stands as a solid part of history.
It is on the ground of what He achieved historically that
Paul identified Jesus with the Son of God who is the " life-
giving Spirit " of humanity. This, it may be suggested, is
a firmer ground for the building of a " Christology " than
minute psychological analysis of the meagre data concerning
the self-consciousness of Jesus in the Gospels. Not that
psychology is of no importance here ; for the investigation
of phenomena of personality which seem to lie beyond the
threshold of ordinary individual consciousness may well lead
us nearer to an understanding of the greatest difficulty in
which Paul's teaching about Christ after all leaves us the
union of the universal and the individual in one personality,
In any case we must set it down as a very sug-
gestive element in Paul's thought, that he regards the
whole of the individual life of Jesus as a working-
out of one supra-historic act of self-sacrifice, in which
we may see the gathering-up of the whole impulse
of self-sacrifice to be found in the history of mankind.
It is the " life-giving Spirit " from whom all this comes,
and there was one human life which was entirely an
expression of it, in that intense, purposive and deliberate
form which is proper only to individuality." According to
Paul, not only had that life of self-sacrifice decisive results
for all men, but it marked a crisis also in the life-history of
Christ. By that humiliation He actually attained a new
relation to humanity and to God, for " God highly exalted
Him " to be Lord of the Racers Henceforward having by
His earthly ministry and death pioneered a highway for
Himself into the hearts of men, He dwells spiritually in
conscious communion with all those who are conformed to
the image of His dying, so that their life is hidden with

Col. i. 19, ii. 9.

*3 Phil. ii. 9-11, CoL i. 18-20, Eph, i. 20-23, I Cor. iv.
23-27, Rom. i. 4, yiii. 34, iiv. 9.

THE SON OF GOD 91

Christ in God, and on earth they form His body, " until He
come." 14 For a day is yet to come when Christ will he
" revealed " in a new and fuller way, and with Him all
who share His life. And in a figurative or mythological
form he shows us Christ as the Captain of His redeemed,
smiting His foes to the ground : and the last of them is
death. Then, Lord of a redeemed and deathless universe,
He makes the last sacrifice. As in the hour of His
humiliation He rendered up His body and soul to God for
the redemption of the world, so now, its victorious King,
He yields up the Body His Spirit has created "that
God may be all and in all." IS

Such is in rough outline Paul's conception of the " historic
Christ " a Christ who has a history of His own, intimately
connected at every stage with the history of Alan from start
to finish ; and who appears as an individual to share man's
life at a point historically determined by His own working
as hidden Spirit in humanity. That appearance on earth
as an individual is the crisis in the history both of Christ
Himself and of the humanity He saves and leads. The
ministry of Jesus, therefore, culminating in His death, is
essential to Paul's whole thought. If in certain aspects of
his theology it is the death that bulks most largely because
it seemed to him to be the purest and most moving
expression of what the whole life meant he is quite
aware that the ethical impulse given by the example
and teaching of Jesus is of the very stuff of the
Christian life. He alludes to the Gospel story but
sparingly, but those who study his teaching most closely
become aware that he is himself acting and speaking

M I Cor. 1. 16-17, *ii. 12-27, Rom. xii. 4-5 (cf. also I Cor. vi,
15), Col. i. 1 8, 24, ii. 19, iii. 15, EpL i. 23, ii. 5-7, 15-22,
iv. 4-16; Rom. viii. 9-11, 17, 1 Cor. iii. ii, 23, II Cor. iv. lo-n,
Col. i. 27, iii. 9-1 1 (cf. Gal iii. 28), EpL iii. 14-19.

*5 IThess.iv. 13-7. 10, 1 Cor.iv. 12-28, Eph. i. 10 ct passim.

92 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

all through under the impulse of the life and teaching of
Jesus. If he refuses to "know Christ after the flesh/" 16 it
means that he will not risk a harking-back to the temporary
conditions of the Galilaean ministry when the Spirit of
Christ is clearly leading out into new fields. The issues
of that ministry have been gathered up in the new experi-
ence of " Christ in me," and that experience gives a living
Christ, who leads ever onward those who will adventure
with Him, and not a prophet of the past, whose words might
pass into a dead tradition.

At the same time, the indwelling Christ is continuous
with the Man who died ; and Paul clearly assumes a
knowledge of the Jesus of the Gospels in his corre-
spondents. It is probable, in fact, that our earliest
Gospel took form to meet the needs of the new
Churches of the Gentile Mission, and that the Gospel
according to Luke represents the picture of Jesus Christ
which was given to the Pauline Churches by one who had
worked for years under Paul's own direction. At the
same time, we must say that Paul's service to Christianity
might have been even greater than it was if he had given
dear expression to the direct religious value of the life
that Jesus lived. One of the tasks still awaiting Christian
thought is the filling out of the categories of Pauline
theology from the content of the human life of Jesus. The
Christian of this generation, to which modern scholarship
has given a clearer picture, perhaps, of Jesus of Nazareth
than has been possessed by men since the earliest ages of
Christianity, should steep his mind in the stories and sayings
of the Gospels, until the Figure of Jesus stands before him
in the colours of life, and then turn anew to the glowing
language in which Paul tells what that Figure meant for
him and means for all men. So we shall miss neither
the vivid humanity of the Gospel story nor the splendid
* II Cor. v. 16-17.

THE SON OF GOD 93

universality of Paul's vision of Christ the unseen Com-
panion of humanity on its long pilgrimage, who for the
accomplishment of His high mission wrough: in a human
life the critical act of deliverance.

To the consideration of that act of deliverance we must
now turn.

CHAPTER VIII
THE DECISIVE BATTLE

IT will be well at this i oint to recal the view which Paul
sets before us of the situat'on with which Christ came to
deal Humanity was fightirg a losing battle against Sin.
For Sin had laid claim to the whole range of man's physical
and psychical existence. The "inner man" maintained a
feeble protest, especially where it was fortified by a dear
knowledge of Right as expressed in law. But that protest
did not make itself effective in action, for knowledge of
the Law could not of itself overcome the weakness of the
" flesh," So complete was the social and racial degradation
of mankind that no individual born could escape partaking
in the general wrongness, consciously or unconsciously.
In either case the wrong way of life must lead to disaster
" The Wrath," or inevitable Nemesis of Sin in a moral
universe. To meet the need, a way must be found to
break the power of Sin and secure for man a new moral
competency and at the same time to replace the revelation
of Right in terms of law by one which should establish
personal relations congruous with the real character of God.
There will therefore be two sides to the work of Christ, a
negative or backward-looking, and a positive or forward-
looking. On the one hand He must defeat Sin and clear
scores with Law. On the other hand He must bring man
moral power and create in him a principle of self-determined
goodness. These two aspects of the matter cannot always

94

THE DECISIVE BATTLE 95

be clearly distinguished, for they are complementary at every
stage ; but we may say roughly that the one side is repre-
sented by what is called the doctrine of Justification by
Faith, the other by the even more important Pauline teach-
ing about life " in Christ." We consider first the former
aspect of the matter.

In order to understand Paul's teaching here it is neces-
sary t to give full weight to his belief in the solidarity
of man. On the one side that solidarity Is considered as
"forensic," i.e. mankind is regarded as a real corpora-
tion which acts and suffers in the person of its repre-
sentative. In primitive society the " personality" of
the tribe or other community is so much more clearly
defined than that of the individuals composing it that the
whole community naturally suffers for any crime of one
of its members. If an Achan breaks tabu^ his whole kin
must perish. If a Macdonald of Glencoe delays to take
the oath of allegiance, his whole clan must be massacred.
It is only an extension of that idea when Paul thinks
of the human race as a corporation represented on the
natural plane by ** Adam," the hypothetical ancestor, whose
act of sin involves the whole Race 5 but capable also of being
represented by Christ, and sharing likewise in His "act
of righteousness." I On the other hand the solidarity is
considered as metaphysical. " Flesh," or the lower part
of human nature, is thought of as a continuum, in which all
individual men share. It is a tainted heritage which comes
to each man burdened with the results of racial sin.
Thus a blow struck at Sin by any human being who
partakes of the " flesh " is struck on behalf of all.

On this double idea of human solidarity rests the theoretical

exposition of Paul's thought about the work of Christ It

is clear that for the purpose of his doctrine the reality of

Christ's human life is absolutely demanded. Only a real

1 Rom. v* 12-21, I Cor. rv. 21-22.

96 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

man of flesh and blood could strike the blow ;r all men.
God, says Paul, sent His Son " in the fcrm of sinful flesh.'*
The word '" form " is not to be taken as expressing any
unreality. By taking " flesh/' Christ occupied the post
of danger, for Sin was lord of the flesh, and claimed Him
as its slave. That He successfully resisted that claim is the
gift He gave to all men who are partakers with Him of our
common nature. He was not a sinner in His own person ;
but " God made Him sin for us." That is said from the
point of view rather of the ** forensic " doctrine of solidarity.
Jesus was made the representative of sinful man, and so before
the law was responsible for sin. We have now an elaborate
metaphor of a law-suit. Sin (personified) claimed its
slave, but the verdict was given against the plaintiff.
That, and not merely the moral censure of sin, is meant by
the strange phrase that " God condemned Sin in the flesh.**
The daim of Sin upon Christ was disallowed, and therefore
the daim of Sin upon all men who are identified with Christ
was disallowed. His death, which might seem a victory
for Sin, is shown by the following resurrection not to be
such a victory. Death had not touched Christ's real self ;
it had become, instead of final defeat, a passage out of the
bondage of " flesh " into the " liberty of the Spirit.'* " The
death He died, He died in relation to Sin, once for all ; the
life that He lives, He lives in relation to God." 3

In all this, Christ is the representative of a corporation
which potentially includes all humanity. Those who are
made one with Christ by that act of "faith," which we shall
presently consider more particularly, enter at once into the
benefits of this emancipation from Sin and this liberty of the
Spirit It is very clearly to be observed that Christ's action is
throughout stricdy representative. He acts for us, but not in
a sense which excludes us from the act, but rather includes
as in it "One died for all ; therefore all died a " says Paul
* II Cor. y. 21, Rom. viii. 3, vi. ro.

THE DECISIVE BATTLE 97

quite clearly. And when he comes to expound the m tter
in more detail, he shows that this co-operation in the act,
however " forensically " it is conceived, is to be inter-
preted in a very practical way. " He died for all, so that
those who live should no longer live for themselves." In
fact, Christ's action becomes available for men exactly in
proportion as His representation of them becomes a real
thing, that is in proportion as they accept its implica-
tions, and make them the guiding principles of their
own lives 3

It is surely in a similar sense that we must understand
the metaphor of sacrifice, which has been pressed so exclu-
sively in much Christian theology, though so far as Paul
is concerned it is less akin to his habitual ways of thought
than the metaphor of the lawsuit. The practice of sacrifice
is in one form or another characteristic of all religions
in their earlier stages of development. The meanings
given to it are various, but almost all depend upon the idea of
solidarity in some sense. The victim is often considered
as one with the Deity, and the worshippers by partaking
in the sacrifice are admitted to the same unity. The
sacrificing priest acts in a completely representative capacity :
his act is the act of the body of worshippers, and the benefits
of the act accrue to them all. Again, in many forms of
ancient sacrifice the priest so represented the Deity that
he was considered as identical with the Deity, and so also
with the victim he offered. Deity, victim, priest, and wor-
shippers formed in the act of sacrifice an organic whole.
Just how much of this complex of ideas lay explicitly in the
minds of the people to whom Pau" wiote it is 'mpossible
to say ; but such is the background of the most universal
element in the religions of his time. It has indeed
been well observed that to the ancients it '-eemed that
they had told the inmost secret of a matter when they had
3 II Cor. v. 14-15, Rom. vi. 5-8.
7

98 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

expressed it in terms of sacrifice, whereas for us it is just
there that the difficulty begins.

We may find a clue to the idea which for Paul was
most regulative of the meaning of sacrifice in the exhor-
tation which he addressed to his correspondents at Rome :
"Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and
fit for God's acceptance, for this is the worship which
reason renders/ 1 4 To give the sentence its proper tone
we may recall that by "body" Paul meant the whole
personality, and not merely the structure of flesh and
blood. Sacrifice is therefore first of all the dedication
to God of all that one has and is. It is surely of
this sacrifice that he speaks when he uses that old-world
expression "the blood of Christ" For to the ancient
mind " the life thereof is the blood thereof." 5 The shedding
of blood meant the laying down of the life. And this laying
down of the life derives its full significance from the
thought of solidarity. An ancient prophet had drawn
from the thought of solidarity the splendid conception of an
ideal Servant of the Lord who hould surrender h!s life in
all manner of humiliation and suffering that others might
live. " Thou shalt make his life an offering for sin. . . .
By his knowledge shall My righteous Servant justify many." 6
It seems to have been in that thought that Jesus went to His
death. Paul did not regard this self-sacrifice of Christ as
being altogether different in kind from the self-sacrifice to
which all Christian people are called in their way. He
professed himself ready " to make up the deficit of Christ's
sufferings on behalf of His Body, the Community." 7 But
there was a completeness about the self-dedication of Christ
which, like everything about Him, pointed to a unique

4 Rom. rii. i.

5 Gen. ii. 4: so Rom. iii. 25, v. 9. I Cor. x. 16, zi. 25, 27,
Eph, i, 7, ii. 13, Col i. 20.

6 Is. liii. xo-ii. 7 Col. i. 24, II Cor. i. 5-7,

THE DECISIVE BATTLE 99

relation to the universal action and eternal purpose of God
for and in man, and which certainly proved itself decisive
in its historical results* The sacrifice of Jesus Christ takes
its unique significance from what He was. The ethical
basis of it all is most clearly brought out by Paul. " Just
as the transgression of a single individual issued in condemna-
tion for all men, so the righteous act of a single individual
issued for all men in a setting-right ('justification'),,
which brought (new) life. For as through the disobe-
dience of one man the multitude of men were set wrong, so
by the obedience of the one the multitude will be set right," B
In the light of all this we may read the passage in
which Paul most explicitly sets forth the work of Christ
in sacrificial terms :

" All went wrong and missed the divine splendour ; and all
are set right by God's free grace through the emancipation worked
in the person of Jesus Christ. God set Him forth as a means of
annulling sin, through the trust (of men), in virtue of the laying-
down of His life. This God did to show His righteousness,,
because of His passing-over of former wrongdoings while He
held His hand with a view to showing His righteousness at
the present time, so that He might be at once righteous and the
Setter-right of those who take their stand upon trust in Jesus." 9

On this difficult passage two comments in particular must
be made. First, the word which our familiar version givts
as "propitiation" does not mean propitiation, which is
properly the soothing of an angry person. The noun
hilasterion is derived from the verb hilaskesthat^ and means*
an instrument or means for the accomplishment of the action
indicated by the verb. The original meaning of hilaskesthai
is " to soothe an angry person." I0 In the Greek Old Testa-

8 Rom. v. 17-19. 9 Rom. iii. 23-26.

10 From this sense of IXao-ireo-flat is derived the common usage
in pagan inscriptions, 9EOIS IAASTIIPION, e a propitiatory
offering to the gods ' ; but it is a mistake to argue directly from
this to the Christian use of the noun.

ico THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

rnent, for example, it is so used for Jacob's propitiation of
Esau. But while pagan usage frequently makes God the
object of such an act, this idea is suggested in the Old
Testament by only three passages out of some scores, and
nowhere in the New Testament. 11 On the other hand, the
meaning u to expiate or annul sin or defilement/' which is
also found in the pagan use of the term, becomes the regular
meaning in the Old Testament. The subject may be a
man (such as a priest;, or God. In the former case the
reference may be to sacrifice, or to ritual washing, or to
any such act by which it was believed in ancient times that
uncleanness could be removed. In the latter case, the
meaning is equivalent to ""forgive." I3 In our present passage,
though God is not actually made the subject of the verb
" to expiate," yet He is said to have " set forth a means of
expiation,** 1 or of dealing with sin. The means is shown to
be thought of in sacrificial terms by the following mention
of " blood," in the sense of life laid down. So far, therefore,
from the sacrifice of Christ being thought of as a means of
soothing an angry Deity, it is represented as an act of
God Himself to cope with the sin which was devastating
human life.

The other comment is upon the latter part of the passage,
and may be made more shortly by a reference to what
has been said above (p. 76). " The passing-over of former
wrong-doings " means the exhibition, in religious experience,
of a principle of the divine dealing which is inconsistent
with strict law. Under the old regime, as Paul sees it,
there were two different principles at work, the principle
of retribution embodied in the scheme of things, and the
principle of mercy discerned in the personal dealings of God

11 Unless ^.atrQrf.i pot, Lk. zviii. 15, is regarded as such a
use ; but though passive in form, the verb is virtually intransitive
in meaning * be propitious/ not * be propitiated.'

E.g. Ps. kiv. 4 (Lxx.=kv. 3, E.T.) Dn. iz. 24

THE DECISIVE BATTLE 101

with men. What was called for was a new revelation in
which one* single principle of righteousness should be dis-
played, and God's character be fully shown forth in dealing
with human sin. 13 This was accomplished in God's gift of
Christ, and in that act of self-dedication to which His
" obedience " to God led him.

There is nothing here about a penalty borne by Christ as
a substitute for guilty man. The nearest Paul comes to
such a suggestion is in a passage in the Epistle to the Ga-a-
tians where he uses the metaphor of the " curse." 14 To the
thought of the ancient world the curse was a real force
launched upon the world and destined ultimately to work
itself out. Such was the curse that lay upon the House of
Atreus in Greek legend, and such the curse pronounced
upon Babylon by the Hebrew prophets. Now the Law
pronounced a curse upon all who should break it. Such a
curse must fulfil itself, quite mechanically. It is a good
argumentum ad homlnem^ at least, when Paul, writing to the
half-Greek, half- Anatolian, and wholly superstitious people
of the Galatian province, bids them think of Christ as having
exhausted in His own person the venom of the ancient
curse somewhat as Orestes in the Greek legend exhausted
the curse of the House of Atreus and finally " reconciled "
the Furies who pursued the family. The teachers who
were seeking to bring Paul's converts back into the allegiance
of the Jewish Law said that unless they complied at least
with certain minimum requirements, the Law still had
power to condemn them. Paul replies : " Even supposing
the sentence of the Law to have all the inevitable ; otency
you attribute to a solemn curse, yet such a curse can be
exhausted. Now Christ bore that curse j for He was
crucified, and the Law expressly puts under a curse the
crucified person. Yet He survived it, and came out

J 3 See Fearon Halliday, Reconciliation and Reality, in this
series. J 4 Gal. iii. 13.

102 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

victorious. He must therefore have broken the power
of the curse, and you need fear the Law no more." In
so far as this is more than metaphor, it is meaningless
to us, for we do not believe that a curse is a substantive
force working inevitably* But we do believe, because we
see it actually happen, that there are circumstances in which,
by defying the consequences, a person may so endure the
pain of corporate wrongdoing as to win power to lead his
fellows out of it. In that sense the comparison throws
a real light upon the work of Christ. It is, however, only a
passing illustration which occurred to Paul in the midst of
that particular controversy, and he does not return to it in
kter letters.

More might be said of the various figures and forms of
thought in which Paul embodies his conviction of the
decisive value of the work of Christ. To our ways of
thought his whole construction is not very satisfactory, if
it be treated in any sense as a system of theology. But
by the flashes of light he throws here and there we can
partly re-read what he tries to portray. Jesus Christ took
the full risk of the human fight against wrong. He
accepted honestly and fearlessly all the conditions of human
nature, and in the wilderness, on the mountain, in the
garden, and in those countless " temptations " of which He
spoke to His disciples, he faced the common foe. He faced
ft as one ** born of woman," having in his human nature
the conditions which in us all make for sin. He faced it as
one ** born under the Law," that is as a Jew of His time,
whose temptations took the specific forms proper to His
age and country. What is more, He faced it as one who
deliberately threw in His lot with the sinful and weak. He
did not withdraw Himself or stand aloof, but was content
to be known as the companion of disreputable characters.
All this we know to be true of the actual life of Jesus Christ,
And facing in this way our common battle, He won victory

THE DECISIVE BATTLE 103

all along the line. He accepted life in a spirit of utter
self-dedication of what Paul calls a " living sacrifice "
and He carried it right through to death ; death with
every circumstance of horror, and with every chance
of escaping it almost to the very end, at the cost of the
smallest unfaithfulness.

But what has all this ancient history to do with us ? We
should scarcely accept Paul's ways of stating solidarity* We
do know, however, that solidarity is very real. We are in
large measure the product for good and ill of the racial
history which lies behind us, and of the social environment
into which we are born. The mystery of heredity is not
yet solved ; but certainly since man had a mental life or
" psychology," that psychology has been social as well as
individual, and it comprises factors, present in the individual^
which are due to the experience cf the race, and most of all to
the achievements of its leaders. The champions of a nation's
liberties, to take an example, bequeath to their nation more
than the actual constitutional liberties they secure in black
and white : they form a psychology of liberty into which
every member of that nation is born. He must do some-
thing with it ; he may disown and struggle against it, but
he cannot divorce his life from its influence. The same
is true of the great witnesses to truth, and the great lovers
of men the poets and artists in life, to whose music the
chords of every individual soul within their corporate
tradition are strung, whether they are played upon or not.
So it is that on a universal human scale what Christ did He
did for us. His great fight and victory are part of the spiritual
history of the Race, into which we are all born. We react
one way or another to those decisive facts. They happened^
and they exist to-day as an indelible part of the psychological
heritage of man. The world in which Christ died is not
a world in which one can live without meeting at all points >
in oneself and in one's environment, the moral challenge

ro4 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

and the moral possibilities which that event mingled in
the stuff of our history. We may react differently to them.
One will accept Christ's way, thereby laying himself open
to all the divine forces, working within humanity, which
Christ released. Another will reject His way, and thereby
make himself an alien from this main stream of spiritual
progress. In either case, the acceptance or rejection is not
a theoretical attitude to a dim past, but a daily reaction to
forces " in the air " of the world in which we move from
day to day. Society is still a tangle of conflicting forces ;
we throw our lives into the sphere of these forces or of those.
To be a Christian is to fling oneself without reserve into the
stream of forces issuing from Christ's supreme moral
achievement.

When we take this point of view, there are certain elements
in the life and death of Jesus Christ which are seen at once
t3 be decisive for us all. He greeted God as Father and
Friend in everything and at every point. His life was
that of a Son, and it was as a Son of God that He made
His sacrifice of self-dedication to the Father. Towards
His fellows a love such as He discerned in God was the
perpetual motive power of action a love generous, impartial,
uncalculating, passionate to save a love that put active,
unceasing beneficence to the ** neighbour " in the central
place, and met wrong with an overplus of good. In such a
life, the principle of sonship and of freedom from retributive
Law is made manifest, and so the possibility of a new kind
of life is communicated to man.

A word should here be spoken upon the significance
which Paul attaches to the resurrection of Christ as the
consummation of His work. It is true that for him, and
certainly for us, the resurrection is vastly more important
as the condition of that permanent communion with Christ
which is the centre of the new life. Of this much more will
be said presently. But Paul also sees in it the conclusive

THE DECISIVE BATTLE 105

proof of His victory over Sin. For us it can hardly take
the same place it took for him in precisely this relation, if
only because bodily death has not for us the same intimate
connection with Sin that Paul had been taught to attribute
to it. 15 We see in death something quite natural, and not
necessarily horrible. Yet in the fact that death had, mani-
festly, no power to quench the living activity of Jesus Christ
we may see a pledge that the natural order itself is sub-
ordinate to the ends of the spiritual life. In that order the
death of the body is an episode, of much interest and signifi-
cance indeed, but still only an episode, for those who stand
for what Christ stood for which is in the end what the
Universe stands for. Putting it negatively, we might say :
Suppose Christ, having lived as He did live and died as He
did die, had then simply gone under. Suppose no one had
henceforward had any sense of dealing with Him. Suppose
in particular that that great wave of spiritual experience
had not passed over the primitive Christians, assuring them
that their Lord was in their midst, and making a Church
possible. Suppose all this to be true : it would not neces-
sarily destroy the validity of what Christ stood for ; but
it might leave us asking whether perhaps He was a mere
rebel against a universe which, on the whole, stood for
something quite different There are many who do think
so. They are our allies in the great fight, but they are
apt to be depressing allies. If, on the other hand, we hold
the continued personal existence and activity of Jesus Christ
to be an assured fact, then we know that what He wrought
on our behalf is also wrought into the very fabric of the
universe in which we live ; and we are at home in it,
even while we rebel against its wrongs.

*5 Rom. v. 12, vi. 23, I Cor. iv. 21. This idea is part of
Paul's Jewish heritage. Cf. IV Ezra iii. 7, vii. 118. See also
Fearon Halliday, op cit. pp. 141-146.

CHAPTER IX
EMANCIPATION

THE death of Jesus Christ, then, we shall consider as a
decisive fact not only in past history, but in the present
constitution of man's world of thought and action, a fact
towards which we must needs take up an attitude positive
or negative. It was the crisis of a great conflict. The
forces of evil gathered themselves for a decisive assault upon
the moral integrity of the Son of God. They drove Him
through the horror of failure, scorn, agony of mind and body,
dereliction of soul, and death in darkness. For all the storm
He never bent or broke. It did not change His perfect
self-surrender to God, or the purity of His love to those who
wrought the wrong. Therein was the proof of His victory.
Such is the fact to which we have to orientate ourselves.
We may decline to accept for ourselves what Christ did ;
we may refuse the principle which His life and death carried
to victory. If so, then we assert against Christ the contrary
principle, the principle which slew Him. " Saul, Saul,
why persecutest thou Me ? " is the protest which Christ
utters against our action. On the other hand, we may
accept the principle of what Christ did. We may accept
it, not as those who believe themselves fit and " able to
drink of that cup, and with that baptism to be baptized,"
but as those who are willing that the act and mind of God
so revealed should be the principle of their own lives, and

106

EMANCIPATION 107

will leave the shaping of those lives to Him. This is what
Paul calls "faith."

This conception is of such fundamental importance in
Paul's teaching that we must try to understand it more
particularly. In the theological constructions which have
been based upon Paul the term " faith " has suffered such
twistings and turnings that it has ahnost lost definition of
meaning. Indeed, even in Paul's own use of the word there
is very great complexity. Perhaps, however, we may get
a clue from his uss of the familiar words " faith to remove
mountains." The expression echoes a saying of Jesus
Christ ; and we shall not go far wrong in starting from
the use Jesus made of the word. " Have faith in God "
was the one condition He propounded to those who sought
His help. 1 By that is clearly meant trust, confidence
directed towards God as the Father and Friend of men.
This is the meaning of the word to Paul. 2 As it is Christ
who not only shows us the God in whom we trust, but who
has also Himself cleared away obstacles and made such trust
possible, faith is alternatively described as " the faith of
Christ," or " faith towards Christ" 3 That, however, is
for Paul in no way different from faith in God. God is in
the last resort the object of faith, for " God is trustworthy."
That is the fundamental postulate of Paul's belief : God is
worthy of our trust. 4 It remains for us to trust Him suffi-
ciently to let Him act. It is wrong to suppose that for Paul
faith is a meritorious act on man's part, which wins salvation,

t I Cor. xin. 2, cf. ML ii. 22-23. 2 I Thess. 5. 8.

3 Rom. iii. 22, 26, Gal. ii. 16, iii. 22, Eph. iii. 12, Phil. iii. 9
(the genitive is not subjective in any case) ; Col. ii. 5. Hearts kv
Xpi0T&> is probably not exactly what we mean by ' faith in Christ ' ;
it is rather faith towards God as conditioned by communion with
Christ, Col. i. 4, Eph. i. 15. In Gal. iii. 26 it is doubtful if kv
Xpttrry 'Irjtrov is to be construed with irtarrew. Outside these
three passages the expression doa not occur in Paul.

4 I Cor. i. 9, x. 13, II Cor. i. 18, I Thess. v. 24.

ic8 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

or even, in a more modern war of speech, a creative moral
principle in itself. Paul does not, in fcct, spe?,I: when he is
using language strictly, of "justification l-y fcirh," t> ut ^
"justification by grace through faith," or ""0:1 the ground
of faith." 5 This is not mere verbal su h:Lt;:. It means
that the " righteousness of God " becomes ours, not by the
assertion of the individual will as such, rut by :hs willingness
to let God work. The critical moment in the religious
life, according to Paul, is the moment when one is willing
to "stand still and see the salvation of Gxl." We can see
how he came upon that thought. Paul had supposed that
he was securing "righteousness" by a lire of feverish
activity, self-assertive, competitive, violent. It all did
nothing but involve him more deeply in moral impotence.
Then he was struck down. " Lord, what wilt Thou have
me to do ? " was the confession of surrender, the word of
" faith."

"Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted strode.
My armour piece by p : ece Thou hast hewed from me.
I am defenceless utterly."

Such is the tone of saving faith in God. It is surrender.
As related to Jesus Christ, it is expressed in the saying " I
am crucified with Christ" or at least that is part of the*
meaning of those pregnant words. For the cross of Christ
manifests utter self-abandonment to the will of God. When
Paul sought to recall his Galatian converts to the full meaning
of their faith, he reminded them how he had " depicted
Christ crucified before their eyes," and that had inspired
their surrender to God. 6

This trust in God is, Paul says, the ground of our " justifi-

5 EpL ii. 8, Rom. iii. 30, iv. 16, v. i, is. 32, Gal. ii. 16,
iiL 24, EpL iii. 12, 17.
* Gal. ii. 19, iii. i, ri. 14; cf. Ac. nii. 8-10.

EMANCIPATION 109

cation," or " setting-right." The word is in the first place
a term of the law-courts. Much as we are said to " j ustify "
a course of action when we show it to be the right course, a
judge was said to "justify" a man when he pronounced him,
upon the evidence, innocent of any crime kid to his charge,
and so restored him to his rights as a citizen. Here, there-
fore, we have one of a whole series of religious and ethical
terms which were inherited from Judaism with its legal
outlook. For the later Jews morality was a legal obligation
to be met ; sin was a '* debt," forgiveness a " remission "
of the legal penalty. Along with these terms goes the word
"justification," meaning the acquittal of an accused person.
It must first be understood in its proper legal sense, with
the help of the entire setting of the law-court, and then as
the whole of ethics is translated out of legal into personal
terms, "justification" will be translated with the rest.
Paul's whole work is a standing challenge to make such a
translation complete.

Here then we have the human soul a prisoner at the bar of
ideal righteousness its own thoughts accusing and defending,
as Paul says. 7 The verdict on the facts must be "Guilty" :
there can be no other. No soul is clear from personal
participation in the moral evil of the race. That verdict
carries with it the sentence to go on sinning till moral disaster
ensues ; for the Wrath or Nemesis of sin is that man is left
to his own evil propensities. The sin we have admitted
into our life is self-propagating, for " what a man sows, he
reaps." 8 But now the prisoner makes his appeal : " I
confess myself guilty, a slave of sinful habit. Nevertheless
I disown this sinful self. I accept the act of Christ, as
representing me. He died to sin ; I make His act mine.
I am crucified with Christ, and I throw myself in trust
upon the God whom Christ has shown me."

7 Rom. ii. 15.

8 Gal. vi. 7, Rom. vi. 23, interpreted by i. 18 sqq.

no THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

" I bind unto myself to-day , . .
By power of faith, Christ's : ncamation . . !
His death on Cross for my salvation,
His rising from the spiced tomb,
His riding up the heavenly way." 8 *

On that basis the prisoner is acquitted. The process
cannot be understood apart from the antique idea of
solidarity which has already been explained. The accused
is acquitted, not by virtue of a righteousness individually
achieved by him, but by virtue of the righteousness of
his representative which he accepts as his own by the
act of faith. " The righteous act of one issues in justifi-
cation for all ... through the obedience of one the
multitude are set right" 9 There is no thought of a
penalty borne by a substitute, but only of a righteousness
achieved by a representative.

So far it would seem that the transaction is a legal fiction.
To an ancient, indeed, its fictitious character would scarcely
be obvious, since for him representation was a fact, and not a
fiction. For us, however, if this is all there is to be said,
then the doctrine of justification is unreal. But this is not
all. We now approach the translation from legal into
personal terms. What is the actual state of mind of the
"justified " person ? He has disowned, not merely certain
evil practices, but his own guilty self. That is implied
in the act of faith in Christ. He is crucified with Christ.
So far as the whole intention of his mind is concerned, that
guilty self is dead and done with. The controlling factor
in the situation is the power and love of God as revealed in
Christ and His " righteous act." That is the centre about
which the man's whole being moves in the moment of
"faith." Outwardly, he is the same man he was, open
still to his neighbours' harsh judgment, liable still to con-
s' Breastplate of St. Patrick. 9 Rom. v. 18-19.

EMANCIPATION in

damnation under a law which balances achievement against
shortcoming. But really the man is changed through and
through by that act of self-committal, self-abandonment to
God. Before God he is indeed dead to sin and alive in a
quite new way to righteousness. In fact, he is righteous,
in a fresh sense of the word ; in a sense in which righteous-
ness is no longer, so to say, quantitative, but qualitative ; in
which it consists not in a preponderant balance of good deeds
achieved, 10 but in a comprehensive attitude of mind and will.
If our highest values are personal values, then at bottom a
man is right or wrong according to his relation with the
personal centre of reality, which is God. There is only
one such relation which is right, and that is the relation of
trusting surrender to God. A man who is in that rektion
to God is right. He is justified, in no fictitious way, but
by the verdict of reality. He possesses righteousness
" not a righteousness of my own, resting upon law, but the
righteousness which comes through trust in Christ, (or to
put it differently) the righteousness which comes from God
on the condition of trust."

There is a real moral and religious revolution here. A
legal religion lays all the emphasis on what a man does, or
wills to do. The power of the will, the self-assertive element
in us, is brought into the foreground. In direct contrast to
this is the religion which says that not what we do, but what
God does, is the root of the matter. " It is not a matter
of deeds done, lest anyone should boast." Righteousness

10 " Much good, some ill he did, so hope all's even,
And tliat his soul through mercy's gone to heaven."

So ends the epitaph of Elihu Yale, the founder of Yale
University, on his tombstone in the churchyard of Wreiham,
North Wales.

11 Phil. iii. 9, cf. Rom. vi. r-ii, riii. 14, Gal. v. 24, Col. iii.
9-11. See also Fearon Halliday, op. cit* chs. x.-xii,

EpL ii. 9, Rom. iii. 27, I Cor. iii. 7 (cf. i. 18-31), iv. 7.

ii2 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

is not the offering of sacrifice, the doing of good deeds, the
entertaining of right opinions, or any of the things whereby
the self is asserted. It is the quiet acceptance of that working
of God whereby we are saved. " It is good that a man should
both trust and quietly wait for the Lord." The immense
energy of the religious life is rooted in a moment of passivity
in which God acts. There is, in fact, no ultimate deliverance
from sin apart from this. If every man started his course
with a clean sheet and a perfectly free will, things might be
different. But none of us do so start. Our best efforts
at self-reform are tainted and misdirected by the evil that is
in us. That is why so often the most sincere efforts of
religious men have produced the most disastrous results. The
more fervour and energy they throw into their endeavours,
the worse for society. The author of Ecclesiastes had this-
kind of righteousness in mind when he gave the caution
"Be not righteous overmuch." Paul knew about it,
for he had, in the fervour of his religious zeal, been a perse-
cutor. But on the Damascus road he came to a standstill ;
and in that moment a new creation was effected. The
weight of past evil was gone : a new life, God-directed,
began.

How immense the moral task which this new creation
imposes we shall presently see. For the moment let us
contemplate the significance of this revolution in religion.
The higher faiths call their followers to strenuous moral
effort. Such effort is likely to be arduous and painful in
proportion to the height of the ideal, desperate in proportion
to the sensitiveness of the conscience. A morbid scrupulous-
ness besets the morally serious soul. It is anxious and
troubled, afraid of evil, haunted by the memory of failure.
The best of the Pharisees tended in this direction, and no
less the best of the Stoics. And so little has Christianity
been understood that the popular idea of a serious Christian
is modelled upon the same type of character. There is

EMANCIPATION 113

little joy about such a religion 5 and as any psychologist
can tell us, the concern about evil magnifies its power. The
ascetic believed that because he was becoming so holy the
Devil was permitted special liberties with him, and found
in his increasing agony of effort a token of divine approval.
Not along this track lies the path of moral progress.
Christianity says : Face the evil once for all, and disown it.
Then quiet the spirit in the presence of God. Let His
perfections fill the field of vision. In particular let the
concrete embodiment of the goodness of God in Christ
attract and absorb the gaze of the soul. Here is righteous-
ness, not as a fixed and abstract ideal, but in a living human
person. The righteousness of Christ is a real achievement
of God's own Spirit in man. It Is a permanent and growing
possession of humanity. It is historic and integral to our
world. Let that righteousness be the centre of attention,
and the sole movement of the soul a full consent to God from
whom it all proceeds. When that is so, the morbid cleft
between the soul and its ideal is bridged ; the insidious
haunting presence of sin is banished ; new powers invade
the soul. " It is God who is at work in us, both in act and
in will."*

It is perhaps worth while to add that modern psycho-
logists recognize the importance of passivity or self-
surrender as the means to a renewal of life and energy.
" Weakness results from the wastage caused by restlessness
of mind ; Power comes from a condition of mental
quietude," says one of them, adding that u several of the
greatest psychologists . . . have tended towards the view
that the source of power is to be regarded as some impulse
that works through us, and is not of our own making." 14
Another observes that " to exercise the personal will is still

*3 Ph2. ii. 13, cf. I Thess. ii. 15, II Cor. iii. 5, 1 Cor. xiL 6.
Col. i. 29, Eph. i. 19-20, iii. 20-21*

*4 J. H, Hadfidd in The Spirit^ pp. 106, lio.

8

ii 4 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

to live in the region where the imperfect self is the thing
most emphasized. Where, on the contrary, the sub-
conscious forces take the lead, it is more probably the better
self in posse that directs the operation." Accordingly a
person a must relax, that is, he must 611 back on the
larger Power that nukes for righteousness. 15

We must now observe that this experience of "justifica-
tion n assumes a different aspect according as the point of
view is specifically religious or spe ^fically ethical. Religious
experience has about it something which is timeless or eternal
In the moment of the soul's touch with God the time pro-
cess disappears. Hence " justification 1 ' as a pure religious
experience of the grace of God is complete in itself and eternal
in its value. Paul can speak of it historically as if
for the Christian it was an event finished once for all. 1 *
But, on the other hand, no one has more cogently than
he presented the tremendous moral endeavour to live
out the righteousness of God. From this ethical point of
view, to which the time-process is all-important, righteous-
ness is a gradual attainment. Almost at the very end of his
life Paul could write, ** It is not as though I had already
won, or become perfect ; I am pressing on in the hope that
I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus kid hold of
me. My brothers, I do not reckon that I have laid hold
of it yet 5 but there is one thing I do forget all that lies
behind, and stretch out to what lies before, and I press on
towards the mark, for the prize of God's upward call in
Christ Jesus." I? One who spoke in that way can hardly
be accused of neglecting the progressive element in morality.

*5 William James, Farieties of Religious Experience, pp. 209-
10. The passages here quoted are taken by James from Star-
buck ; but the whole of James* discussion of the type of conversion
* by self-surrender/ in Lecture ii. provides an illuminating com-
ment on Paul. l6 Rom, v. i, 9, viii. 30, 1 Cor. vi. n.

J 7 Phil. iii. 12-14, cf. I Cor. ii. 23-27, Gal. v. 5.

EMANCIPATION 115

Yet Paul is never far from the thought of that finished work
from which all human endeavour flows. " Work out your
own salvation, because it is God who is at work in you.*' rt

There is a difficulty here for us, as it proved a difficulty
for his first converts. It may be that the peculiar character
of his own conversion its suddenness and completeness
may have led him into too unqualified statements of the
" once-for-all-ness " of justification. In any case it is
clear that he was misunderstood on this point by converted
pagans who took in unintelligent literalness his strong
asseition that " we have been cleansed, justified, sanctified."'
We cannot, however, escape from the difficulty by any short
cut There is a finality in that religious experience which
Paul calls justification, while there is none the less a moral
process. For most of us there must be a repeated harking
back to the moment of surrender. After failure and fell
we must enter once more into the " secret place of the Most
High " to renew our abnegation of the guilty self and our
acceptance of the righteousness of God in Christ Paul
perhaps allows too little for this necessity, explicitly at least.
But for all that, it is of vital importance that he told us so
plainly that everything depends on an act of God, eternal
and single, in the soul, renewable indeed by acts of faith,
but in its essence the one abiding fountain of all such acts,
as of all moral endeavour.

"God justifies the ungodly." 19 That is the watch-
word of the Pauline Gospel. It states in a dogmatic

18 Phil. ii. 12-13* We may observe tow this reproduces in
new terms wliat Jesus had said about the Kingdom of God.
" It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the Kingdom " ;
and yet " Seek ye first the Kingdom of God " : " The Kingdom
of God is like treasure hid in a field, which a man found, and
. . . sold all he had and bought that field " : " Strait is the
gate and narrow the way that leadeth unto life."

*9 Rom. iv. 5*

ii6 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

phrase the truth which the life of Jesus declared. To
the paralytic He pronounced forgiveness, there and then,
before any amendment or reparation of wrong had taken
place, simply on the ground of faith. The woman who
was a sinner He accepted as forgiven, finding the proof
of it in the love she showed. He received disrepu-
table characters. No Pharisee would have objected, one
supposes, if He had first made them respectable and then
consorted with them. The Pharisees could not away with
this restoration to full rights as children of God on the sole
ground of a simple faith. To forgive the paralytic was
" blasphemy " ; to receive sinners was a scandal. But
Jesus told a story of two men who went to pray. The
disreputable tax-collector threw himself on the mercy of
God in simple trust. He went home "justified." The
Pharisee thanked God for the righteousness he had attained
as Paul would say, u he gloried before God on the ground
of works/' But he was not j ustified. One Pharisee at least
awoke to the truth, and he has told us what it meant. It
took a Pharisee to see all that Christ's action implied. Paul
the Pharisee put it into the crabbed theological terms he had
been taught, but transcended those terms in the statement.
It will help towards the appreciation of what Paul meant
by the forensic term "justification " if we consider other
figures which he uses to describe the same experience. It
is emancipation, deliverance from the yoke of an external
moral standard and from the tyranny of evil habit. The
justified man is like a slave freed from his master's power; or
like a widow whom her husband's death has emancipated
from the absolute dominion (potestas) into which Roman
Law gave the married woman ; or like the heir who on
attaining his majority bids farewell to guardians and
trustees, and becomes master in his own house. 20 It is no

associated with otjecuWic Rom. iii. 24,
I Cor. L 30, cf. Eph. i. 7, 14, Col. i. 14. See also Rom.

EMANCIPATION 117

mere change of status of which Paul speaks in such meta-
phors. It is a real deliverance from something which
denies free play to the human will to good. Yet it is not
the attainment of that " unchartered freedom " which means
bondage to " chance desires." 3I On the other side, it means
entering into a new allegiance. Once Paul describes it,
apologizing for the boldness of the metaphor, as " servitude "
towards God. And indeed his perpetual use of the appella-
tion " slave of Jesus Christ," which is directly correlative
to the title " Lord," preserves always the sense of a very
binding allegiance. The immediate antecedents of language
of that kind are probably to be found in the religious termi-
nology of the time. The members of a religious cult, bound
sacramentally to one another and to their patron God,
addressed Him as their "Lord." The Emperor was
addressed as "Lord" when he was regarded as a divine
object of worship. It was because the Christian would
not give the Emperor the divine honour which he
retained for Jesus alone, that the Church came into
deadly conflict with the Empire. Thus Paul thought
of the Christian life as freedom within a very absolute
allegiance.

The more pregnant term, however, for this relation to
God is "sanctification." In religious language "holy"
means devoted to the Deity. The sanctification of
the Christian means that he is entirely devoted to God ;
he is as truly and exclusively dedicated to the service
of God as any temple or priest in the older religions.
The distinction which theology has made between
justification as the momentary act of deliverance and
sanctification as the process of attaining perfection is
not to be found in Paul. For him they are only

vi. 6-7, 12-23, viii. 2 y II Cor. iii. 17, Gal. iv. 1-7, 21-31,
v. i, 23.

a* See Wordsworth, QJt to Duty.

ii8 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

different aspects of the same act. 33 By the same act of
grace that justifies we are also sanctified ; and as the righteous-
ness attributed to us by the act of justification is to be appro-
priated through a course of moral endeavour, so is the sanctity
imparted to us by the same act to be worked out in the moral
life. God justifies the ungodly, and in the same sense He
sanctifies the unholy. He claims us as entirely His own ; and
in proportion as we admit that claim steadily in all the
changing experiences of life, it establishes itself in a character
bearing the manifest stamp of God.

We are already at the point of transition from what has

been called the negative or backward-looking aspect of

Christ's work for us to the positive or forward-looking.

The two aspects are combined by Paul in one striking and

comprehensive metaphor, that of dying and rising again.

Here he makes use of the symbolism of baptism, which in

the East was performed by the complete immersion of the

believer in water. " We were buried with Christ through

our baptism (and so entered) into a state of death, in order

that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the

splendour of the Father, we too might walk in the newness

which belongs to (real) life." 23 To the rite as such Paul

did not attach overwhelming importance. " Christ," he says,

" did not send me to baptize, but to preach the GospeL" *4

But to his pagan converts it appealed as a sacrament parallel

to those of the Greek mysteries. The governing idea of all

mysteries was that by the performance of physical acts

spiritual effects could be attained. And principally, such

sacramental acts united the worshipper with his dying and

rising Saviour-God. In some cults such a union seems to

have been regarded as a real dying and rising of the worshipper,

in the sense that through the sacrament he acquired from

M I Cor. 71. 1 1 , i. 30, cf. Rom. vi. 19, 1 Thess. iv. 3-7, 1 Cor. iii.
16-17, vi. 19, EpL ii. 21.
*3 Rom. vi. x-ix, Col. iL 10-13. * 4 I Cor. i. 13-17.

EMANCIPATION 119

the God an immortal essence. In a similar way Paul's
pagan converts thought of baptism, Paul recognized in
the idea a most suggestive figure for the change wrought
by faith in Christ. He found it necessary to guard against
the crude sacramentalism which found in the mere physical
process as such the actual impartation of new life, quite
apart from anything taking place in the realm of inward
experience. The Israelites in the wilderness, he pointed
out in a curious argument, received baptism in the Red
Sea and in the cloud which overshadowed them ; and
yet they were disobedient, " the majority of them God did
not choose," and they perished miserably. 3 5 The inference
is plain. No sacramental act achieves anything unless It
is an outward symbol of what really happens inwardly in
experience. The test of that is the reality of the new life
as exhibited in its ethical consequences. " How can we
who are dead to sin live any longer in sin ?" If baptism
is a real dying and rising again, then it is indeed a profound
revolution in the personal life, a revolution which is simply
bound to show itself in a new moral character*

It is in this sense that Paul appeals to the baptism of the
Christian the act by which he entered into the Christian
communion. If that rite means anything, he says, it means
that you share with Christ His dying to sin and His rising
to new life.

" The death He died, He died in relation to sin, once for all ;
the life He lives, He lives in relation to God. In the same
way you must reckon yourselves as dead in relation to sin, and
alive in relation to God in (communion with) Christ Jesus. And
so Sin must not reign in your mortal body" (i.e. in the physical
part of the individual organism, in which, according to Paul,
Sin had become firmly entrenched) " so that you obey its desires*
Do not make over your bodily organs to Sin, as implements of
unrighteousness, but make yourselves over to God, as persons

5 I Cor. x. I-TI.

120 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

raised to life from the dead, and your bodily organs as implements
of righteousness to Him. For Sin shall not be your lord, since
you are not under Law, but tinder (God's) grace." a6

In reading the passage we are aware that Paul is
speaking of something profoundly real in his own experience.
We have left now the region of mere metaphor, and entered
into a sphere where spiritual realities are described in terms
not indeed adequate to them, but coming as near as may he
to direct expression. The " death " spoken of is a real
deadening of certain sides of the nature, a real privation
of life and energy on the part of evil propensities. " I am
crucified to the world." The crucified person the man
with the hangman's rope about his neck, shall we say ?
has done with this world, its interests and concerns. It is
all over. The mind has become detached. Even so Paul
found that in the moment of his conversion he had become
detached from much which had before dominated him.
That obstinate *' covetousness " which the contemplation of
law had seemed only to strengthen the ambition, egoism,
perhaps lust, which are summed up in that word was
dried up from its springs. He cared no more about the
very things which had been his greatest pride. ** The things
which used to be gain to me," he wrote, " I have now
reckoned so much loss because of Christ In fact, I
reckon everything mere loss, because the knowledge
of Christ Jesus my Lord so far exceeds them all. On
His account I have actually suffered the loss of every-
thing, and I reckon it all mere refuse so that I may
gain Christ." *7

It is apparent that, stated in its absolute form, this " death
and resurrection " was not true of many of his pagan converts.
To them the " death " was ceremonial, the " resurrection "
a theoretical inference from it, and the moral change had

a * Rom. vL 12-14. 7 Gal. vi. 14, Phil, in. 7-11.

EMANCIPATION 121

taken place only partially. That is why, instead of the
positive statement which would seem to be required logically,
he sometimes gives an exhortation. "Let not Sin reign . . .
Do not make your bodies implements of unrighteousness."
He seems, indeed, to have found by experience the necessity
for greater emphasis on the process. " I have been crucified
with Christ," he wrote to the Galatians in the height of
his mission. It has been pointed out that crucifixion is in
any case a lingering death* But in what is possibly his last
letter he speaks of " getting conformed to His death " a
process not yet complete. Yet he knew always that every-
thing was involved in that decisive moment. He died to
sin once. Thenceforward he " carried about in the body
the dying of the Lord Jesus," and the course of life as it
came day by day made the death more and more a reality
in the workaday world. 38 More and more in those later
days he was conscious that the real life he lived was a hidden
life. " You died," he wrote to the Colossians from his
Roman prison, "and your life lies hidden with Christ in
God. When Christ, who is our life, is manifested, then we
too shall be manifested with Him in splendour." *9 The
" self behind the frontage," it has been observed, is in all of
us something greater than the self of the shop-window
which all the world can see. J For the Christian that secret
self is perpetually nourished into greatness by inward com-
munion with God in Christ.

" As torrents in summer,
Half-dried in their channels,
Suddenly rise, the' the
Sky is still cloudless,
For rain lias been falling
Far off at their fountains

** II Cor. iv. 7-1 1. *9 Col. Hi. 1-4.

3 H. G. Wells, The New Mackiavelli, pp. 291-2.

122 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

So hearts that are fainting
Grow full to o'crflowing,
And thej that behold it
Manrel, and know not
That God at their fountains
Far off has been raining." 3 1

The faithful endeavour to keep open all the avenues
between this hidden world and the world of every day is
the way to what Paul means by " getting conformed to
the death of Christ" and "knowing the power of His

resurrection."

Longfellow, Saga of King Qlaf, nil.

CHAPTER X
THE LORD THE SPIRIT

" GOD gives proof of His love for us in the fact that while
we were still in the wrong Christ died for us. Much
more then, now that we have been set right by means of His
self-sacrifice, shall we be saved from the Wrath through Him.
For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God
through the death of His Son, much more now that we are
reconciled shall we be saved by means of His life." 1 In that
repeated "much more" is much virtue. Theology has
often represented Paul as though he were supremely or even
solely interested in the death of Christ on the cross and the
" Atonement" thereby effected. This is a somewhat
ironical fate for one who showed so clearly that his eyes
were set upon the risen Christ, and his thought returned
gladly again and again to the wonder of the new life He gave.
That positive gospel of the resurrection-life in Christ was
an even greater thing to Paul than the doctrine of justification,
important as this was in clearing the ground of all that
cumbered the course. ** If you are risen with Christ, seek
the things that are above, where Christ is, on the right hand
of God." Paul is always exultantly aware that as a Christian
he is a new man, living in a new age* With Christ's
resurrection the limits of the old order have been broken
through. It is an age of miracle, in which nothing is too
good to be true. The hope of the new age had often

1 Rom. v. 8-10.
123

124 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

associated itself with a belief in the emancipation of the
body from the limitations of physical existence* Mani-
festly this had not come about for the Christians of the first
century : they still looked for it to come at the Lord's
appearing. But Paul held that in principle the Christian,
whose real self was hid with Christ in God, was already
delivered from the c< flesh " and living in an age of " glory."
The " flesh " might indeed be " an unconscionable time
a-dying," but the actual experience of the new life showed
that the moral powers of " eternal life " were at work.
Now in this Paul met half-way a characteristic belief of
the pagan religious world. It was held possible, by the per-
formance of certain rites, or the acquisition of certain secret
knowledge, to become immortal while in the body. There
was an inward "deification" which ensured everlasting
life for the initiate after death. Paul made use of this idea,
while correcting its exclusively metaphysical and sacramental
bias. For the Greek as indeed in large measure for later
Christian theology as formed by the Greek mind the
essential thing was a change of " substance " or metaphysical
nature j its means, a rite or an esoteric doctrine; and its aim
and end the assurance of life beyond the grave. For Paul
the essential thing was a new moral character, as the only
real evidence of a life akin to the life of God, and its means
was the receiving of Christ, not by any magical rite, nor by
assent to a system of doctrine, but in the moral fellowship
of " faith." The risen life is in the first place a life whose
fruits are ethical. Prolonged into the future it means
immortality, because life of that kind, made ethically valuable
through a personal fellowship, cannot be ended by the death
of the body. Moral conduct and immortality alike are
represented as the harvest of an indwelling Spirit. " The
fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, loyalty, self-control"; "he who sows into the
Spirit will reap out of the Spirit eternal life." Otherwise

THE LORD THE SPIRIT 125

expressed, the Spirit is " the first instalment of our inherit-
ance." All that man hopes for as the corporate perfection
of life is given in principle by that Spirit whose moral
efficacy is a matter of daily experience to the Christian. 2
This idea of the Spirit is so vital to Paul's teaching that it will
be well to make some attempt to see it in its historical
context of thought.

In Jewish apocalyptic thought, the expectation of c< the
life of the coming age," or the Kingdom of God, was
associated with the idea of the possession of men by the
divine, or holy, Spirit, which had moved the ancient prophets
and saints. The possession of the Spirit was conceived as
bringing a miraculous heightening of the normal powers
the ability to see things invisible, to hear divine voices, to
speak mysterious and prophetic words, to heal disease, and
to dominate the world of matter. After the death of Jesus
there broke out among His followers phenomena such as
have frequently been observed in periods of religious exalta-
tion or " revival." Persons fell into trances in which they
heard unutterable words spoken, or saw visions of Christ
and of heavenly beings. The powers of suggestion and of
suggestibility were greatly intensified, so that morbid cases
of divided personality ("demon possession") yielded to
the suggestions of sanity ; and even physical ailments of the
limbs and bodily organs proved amenable to treatment by
mental processes. In public gatherings men would be
moved by a storm of intense feeling to utter cries which,
though inarticulate, were held to be full of deep meaning,
perhaps even to be the '* tongues of angels." On a higher
level they had moments of exceptional insight into truth,
which they attempted to express in words of " prophecy."3

2 Gal. v. 22-23, vi. 8, Rom. viii. 23, II Cor. i. 22, v. ;,
Eph. i. 14, Col. i. 27.

3 The locus classicus for ' pneumatic * phenomena is I Cor. iii.-
riv., which elucidates the references to similar phenomena in Acts.

126 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

None of these phenomena were unparalleled or in the strict
sense miraculous, but to the early Christians it seemed that
these were the literal fulfilment of the miraculous expecta-
tions of Apocalyptic. They were valued accordingly,
as the manifestation of the Messianic Spirit, the gift of the
new age. The simple followers of Jesus to whom these
strange things happened were elated by the sense of power
they brought. They scarcely realized that the real miracle
was something deeper and greater than all this. Beneath
the froth of ** revivalism " flowed the steady stream of moral
life renewed through the inspiration of Jesus Christ in His
life and death.

The Gospel went out into the pagan world, where
the moral background of the original Christian com-
munity was kcking. The volatile converts of Anatolia
and Greece hailed with avidity the most exciting and
spectacular effects of the " revival " fervour. The magical
and occult has always a fascination. There was grave
danger that the Gospel would evaporate in a burst of sen-
sationalism. This danger Paul had to face, and in facing
it he was driven to apply the cold light of a searching criticism
to these emotional phenomena in which he himself fully
shared. The faculty of self-criticism is rare enough any-
where. It is particularly rare in enthusiasts. Paul
possessed it, and for that reason he was able to give to the
Christian community such a sympathetic and convincing
estimate of spiritual values that the whole idea of the Spirit
became a new thing. He never thought of denying that
there was a real value in the visions of glory and the inspired
utterances which men attributed to the Spirit; but he
pointed out that these were mere symptoms, and symptoms
of varying value. For instance, " speaking with tongues,"
or the utterance of emotional cries of no clear meaning,
was, though more surprising, far less valuable than the clear
insight into truth which expressed itself in prophecy. But

THE LORD THE SPIRIT 127

greater than all was the moral renewal that the Spirit
brought. The reality behind all was that sharing of the
risen life of Christ which reproduced in the believer the
character of his Lord.

We have seen that Paul believed in a "life-giving Spirit"
who all through the ages was the fountain of life to men,
and was manifested at last in an individual human person,
Jesus Christ. In accordance with this belief he held the
Spirit, which the early Church believed it possessed, to be
no other than Christ Himself, now liberated from the
necessary limitations of His human life, and entering by
direct fellowship into the Christian. This did not mean,
as has been said, ** a certain de-personalizing " of Christ
On the contrary, it meant the elevation of the idea of Spirit
from the category of substance to that of personality. To
have the Spirit does not mean, as it used to mean, that some
mysterious stream of divine essence is passing into the human
organism. It means being in the most intimate conceivable
touch with a Person. There are two sides to Christian
experience as Paul knows it On the one side it is a life
of trust and love towards " the Son of God, who loved me
and gave Himself for me" ; on the other side it is a life
renewed from within by an immanent Spirit Yet the
Lord we trust is none other than the indwelling Spirit that
is the inspirer of our thoughts, our prayers, and our moral
acts.4 Christ without, our Saviour, Friend, and Guide;
Christ within, the power by which we live.

There lies here a deep mystical experience only partially

4 II Cor. iii. 17, Instead of multiplying references to show
the identity of Christ's work with that of the Spirit, I would suggest
to the interested reader that lie should take a Concordance and
discover for himself how often a statement made about Christ
in one place can be confronted with a closely similar statement
made in another place about the Spirit. He should iave no
difficulty in filling a quarto sheet with such doublets.

128 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

capable of description in words. But is there not a partly
analogous duality in our deepest relations with one another ?
You have a friend, dear as your own soul, the very embodi-
ment of that which you admire and aspire to. Now you
may sit in the room and converse with your friend, and
his spoken word, or act, or look, may exert upon you the
influence of his personality. Or you may be apart and he
may exert that influence by letter. Or without letter you
may recall him so vividly that the memory serves as a potent
source of influence. All this is still the friend without.
But when once the influence is established, there is a some-
what abiding in the central places of your own mind which
is yet not yours but your friend's. You may even be uncon-
scious of it, but it shows itself in countless ways. Some one
will remark, " I seemed to hear X. in what you said just
now " ; or " The way you did that was so exactly X. that
I could have fancied him here." In some strange way your
friend has become a part of yourself animus dimidium tu&.
There is more here than we can readily express ; and perhaps
it is not altogether different from the double relation of
Christ to the faithful soul Paul converses with the Lord
as a man converses with his friend : ** Thrice I besought
the Lord . . . and He said . . ." But at other times
" The Spirit of Jesus suffered him not." 5

The Gospel used to be presented as an appeal to believe
in the Saviour who " did it all for me long ago," and then
retired to a remote heaven where He receives the homage of
believers till He come again to inaugurate the Millennium,
The mind of our generation, having little comprehension
or taste for such a message, is usually content to try and dis-
cover ** the Jesus of history,'* conceived as a human example
and teacher of a distant past Meanwhile there exists always
alongside all forms of religious belief the great tradition
of mystical experience* The mystic knows that whatever
5 II Cor. xii. 1-9, Ac. xvi. 6-7, cf. I Cor. ii. 16, Gal. L 12.

THE LORD THE SPIRIT 129

be the truth about an historic act or person there is a Spirit
dwelling in man. In our time even natural science abates
its arrogant denials and admits the possibility of such
immanence. The most deeply religious spirits of our time
tend to take refuge from the uncertainties of belief in an
inward sense of communion with the divine, which is too
widely attested in human experience to be easily set aside ;
and they report that they have no need of an historic
Christ at all. The weak point of mysticism, as seen at least
by a matter-of-fact person, is that it is apt to be so nebulous
ethically. What the Immanent is, those who claim most
traffic with It can often tell us least. Is It a power making
for righteousness, or is It a higher synthesis of good and evil ?
Or is It not a moral that is to say, not a personal Being
at all ? Does It work " by rapt aesthetic rote," " like a
knitter drowsed " ? 6 The raising of these questions is not
intended to throw any doubt upon the validity of mystical
experience as such ; but we have a right to ask what
content is given in the experience. Paul was a mystic,
but all his mystical experience had a personal object.
It was Jesus Christ, a real, living person historic,
yet not of the past alone ; divine, yet not alien from
humanity. The Spirit within was for him continuous with
the Spirit of Jesus Christ, and recognized by His lineaments.
To express this fact, Paul coined a new phrase. The
primitive Christians were accustomed to speak, in language
which was older than Christianity, of being " in the Spirit,"
as though Spirit were an ethereal atmosphere surrounding
the soul, and breathed in as the body breathes the air. Paul,
too, used this expression, but he placed alongside it a parallel
form of words, " in Christ," or " in Christ Jesus." Where
we find those words used we are being reminded of the
intimate union with Christ which makes the Christian life
an eternal life lived in the midst of time. The deeper
< Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts
9

130 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

shade of meaning would often be conveyed to our minds if
we translated the phrase " in communion with Christ"

Thus the Imitation of Christ is not an attempt to copy
His recorded acts and ways of life an attempt which can
scarcely expect much success, where the conditions of life
are so different. It means to be " in Christ," to give heed
to the Christ within, who seeks to propagate in other men
the truly human life which He once lived in Galilee and
Jerusalem. The Christ of Nazareth had one life only
to live between the manger and the cross the life of
Carpenter, Teacher, and rejected Messiah of the Jews.
He must live again in countless human lives before He is
fully Messiah of mankind, in the lives of modern men and
women placed in a world so different from that which spread
itself around His village home in ancient Galilee. To
express this in a satisfying theology is a baffling task : to
make it a reality in life is a problem solved in surprisingly
large measure by many simple Christians in all ages, who
could say with Paul, * 4 For me to live is Christ." The
truly Christian life is a life not transcribed from the pages of
the Gospels, but continuous with the divinely human life
there portrayed, because the genius of the same Artist is at
work on the new canvas. ** We all reflecting as in a mirror
the splendour of the Lord, are being transformed into the
same image (of God), from splendour to splendour, as by
the working of the Lord the Spirit." 7

We can trace how in Paul's writings this thought of " the
Lord the Spirit " dominated the whole range of Christian
experience. The initiation into the Christian life the
baptism by which we die and rise again with Christ is
** baptism in the Spirit," the steeping of the whole being
in the Spirit of Christ.* This is the true baptism, of which

7 Phil. i. 21, Gal. ii. 20, iv. 19, II Cor. Si. 12-18, Rom. liii,
14, Eph. iii. 17. Cf. I Thess. i. 6, 1 Cor. xi. i.
* I Cor. xii. 13, cf. Gal. iii* 27, Rom. vi. 3.

THE LORD THE SPIRIT 131

the immersion in water is only the effectual sign. It means
the implanting within our human nature of a divine element,
present indeed in germ and in potentiality before, but woe-
fully obscured and frustrated by our participation in the
wrongness which infects all human society as it is. This
divine element, freed now and brought to conscious life,
salutes the Lord and Giver of Life with the acclamation
" Abba, Father ! " For the Spirit we have received is the
Spirit of the Son of God, and we possessing it are God's
sons too, and " that of God in us " leaps out towards the
God who is the source of it. The Spirit of Jesus within
us moves us to prayer : indeed, prayer is just that moving of
God's Son in us towards the Father. Though we are
burdened with the greatness of our need, so that our prayers
are not even articulate, yet in such "inarticulate sighs"
the Spirit " intercedes for us." This gives us the true
character of all Christian worship. It is an expression of our
" partnership with God's Son." 9 Whatever outward forms
it may use or shun Christian worship is the reciprocal
fellowship of God and His sons. He gives the Spirit, which
then returns to Him in prayer and adoration. The norm
and prototype is Christ the Son of God. The lonely
prayers on Galilaean hills by night, the " exultation in the
Spirit " when He cried " I thank Thee, Father, Lord of
heaven and earth," the agonizing supplications of Geth-
semane " Abba, Father, Thy will be done ! " these
are re-enacted in His brethren in whom the Spirit prays.

Therewith comes also a new possibility of knowledge
of God. There is indeed a natural knowledge of God
innate in man, but it is, in experience at least, dim and
lacking in conviction, being mediated by His works. 10
But to share Christ's Spirit is to be admitted to the secrets of
God. Perhaps one of the most striking features of the early

9 Gal. iv. 6-7, Rom. viii. 14-17, I Cor. i. 9; Rom. viii. 26-
27, EpL vL 1 8. 10 Rom. i. 19-21*

132 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

Christian movement was the re-appearance of a confidence
that man can know God immediately. Judaism had become
traditional : the word of the Lord, the Rabbis held, came
to the prophets of old, but we can only preserve and interpret
the truth they handed down. Jesus Christ, with a con-
uJence that to the timid traditionalism of His time
appeared blasphemous, asserted that He knew the Father
and was prepared to let others into that knowledge. He did
so, not by handing down a new tradition about God, but
by making others sharers in His own attitude to God.
This is what Paul means by " having the mind of Christ."
Having that mind, we do know God. It was this
clear, unquestioning conviction that gave Paul his power
as a missionary : but he expected it also in his converts,
To them too "the word of knowledge" came "by
the same Spirit." He prayed that God would give
them a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the know-
ledge of Him. Such knowledge is, as Paul freely grants,
only partial, but it is real, personal, undeniable know-
ledge. In friendship between men there is a mutual
knowledge which is never complete or free from mystery :
yet you can know with a certainty nothing could shake
that your friend is " not the man to do such a thing, 97 or
that such and such a thing that you have heard is "just like
him." You have a real knowledge which gives you a
criterion. Such is the knowledge the Christian has of his
Father.

This knowledge of God gives a new ground for the
ethical life. We have seen that for Paul the " conscience,"
or consciousness of oneself as a moral being, is the court of
moral judgment Now when a man has received the Spirit
of Christ, that Spirit enters and inhabits the central place of

" I Cor. ii., iii. 8, II Cor. z. 3-6, I Thess. i. 5, PHI,
i. 9-10, Col. ii. 2-3, EpL i. 17, I Cor. viii. 1-3, Gal. iv. 9,
I Cor. riii. 12.

THE LORD THE SPIRIT 133

his self-consciousness : " he is conscious of himself, not as a
man merely, but as a son of God, standing in a special
relation to Jesus Christ. When a moral question arises, it
takes the form, not " Is this unworthy of myself ? Does it
hurt my self-respect ? " but " Does this hurt my relation to
Jesus Christ ? Is it unworthy of Him ? " Not that Jesus
is referred to as an outside standard : it is " Christ living in
me " who is the j udge. In this way the Christian approaches
all practical problems of ethics : he brings the mind of
Christ to bear on it. This, of course, he cannot do unless
the mind of Christ is his mind too. That is to say, the
Christian solution of any difficulty cannot be reached by
one who disinterestedly and externally examines and com-
pares the evidence, without being committed to the result
of his examination. It is revealed to him who lets Christ's
mind dominate him day by day, and then sees things as they
appear to that mind. He has thus his ethical standard within
himself. Here is the real secret of moral emancipation
In the Gospels we see Jesus taking up a wonderfully detached
attitude to traditional morality, picking and choosing,
rejecting and sanctioning, in a way which must have appeared
bewildering to his contemporaries in a way, indeed, which
few of His followers really understood. Paul grasped the
secret of it. Jesus dealt in this sovereign way with the moral
law because the Spirit of God who gave the law was His
Spirit : because the inward impulse that shaped His own
life was the very central impulse of all true morality. He was
God's Son, and lived in His Father's house ; and the law of
the family of God was His very nature. In all this the
Christian is a " partner of the Son of God." ** He who has
the Spirit judges all things, and is judged by no one." The
principle of moral autonomy could not be more strenuously
asserted.^ And Paul's willingness to trust the autonomy of

12 Rom. ix. i, I Cor. viii. 12.

13 I Cor. ii. 15, iv. 3-5.

134 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

others is often really touching,^ though we need not seek
to excuse his occasional attempts at a dictation which was
really not consistent with his principles.

Here we have Paul's sufficient justification against those
who accused him of antinomianism or a relaxing of moral
standards. The moral demand of letting Christ's Spirit
rule you In everything is far more searching than the demand
of any code, and at the same time it carries with it the
promise of indefinite growth and development. It means
that every Christian is a centre of fermentation where the
morally revolutionary Spirit of Christ attacks the dead mass
of the world. Ethical originality is the prerogative of the
Christian whose conscience Is the seat of Christ's indwelling :
and such originality is imperative for a world which is
"saved in hope," a world which needs progress. The
seeming extreme individualism of this doctrine is corrected
by the doctrine of the Body to which we shall come
presently : but for the moment let us do full justice to
Paul's claim of autonomy for the Christ-inspired conscience.
It is a claim we must press with all our might in a world
where belief in regimentation is strong and growing. In
relation to the existing world-orders, in so far as they are
based on the violent assertion of authority, serious Christianity
is anarchism. It does indeed reverence authority in so
far as that authority is " an agent of God for good," but it
obeys God rather than man, and, in the last resort, with
Paul, "cares not a rap for the judgment of any human
tribunal" *5

The indwelling of Christ's Spirit means not only moral
discernment, but moral power. Paul's count against the
Law is that it was impotent through the flesh. Against
this impotence Paul sets the ethical competence of the

X 4 See especially Phil. iii. 15-16, which a false reading repre-
sented by the A.V. has changed into a plea for uniformity !
X S Rom. xiii. r, 4; I Cor. iv. 3.

THE LORD THE SPIRIT 135

Spirit ** I can do anything in Him who makes me strong,"
he exclaims. For his friends in Asia he prays " that
God may grant you, according to the wealth of His splen-
dour, to be made strong with power through His Spirit in
the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through
your trust in Him."** This is the antithesis of the dismal
picture presented in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to
the Romans, and it comes, just as evidently as that, out of
experience. Indeed, we may say that the thing above al!
which distinguished the early Christian community from
its environment was the moral competence of its members.
In order to maintain this we need not idealize unduly the
early Christians. There were sins and scandals at Corinth
and Ephesus, but it is impossible to miss the note of genuine
power of renewal and recuperation the power of the
simple person progressively to approximate to his moral ideals
in spite of failures. The very fact that the term " Spirit "
is used points to a sense of something essentially " super-
natural" in such ethical attainment. For the primitive
Christians the Spirit was manifested in what they regarded
as miraculous. Paul does not whittle away the miraculous
sense when he transfers it to the moral sphere. He con-
centrates attention on the moral miracle as something
more wonderful far than any " speaking with tongues." So
fully convinced is he of the new and miraculous nature
of this moral power that he can regard the Christian as a
" new creation." This is not the old person at all : it is a
"new man," a created in Christ Jesus for good deeds." J 7

The result of all this is that the Christian is a free
man. It is here to be observed that the term "free-
dom" is ambiguous in common usage* It is some-

16 Phil, iv.13, EpL iii. 14-19, 1 Cor. i. 18, 24, ir. 20, Rom. 3.
1 6, II Cor. rii. 9-10, xiii. 3-4.

*7 II Cor. v. 17 (cf. I Cor. iv. 15), EpL ii. 10, iv. 24, Col. iii.
1, Rom. iii. 2.

136 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

times used to imply that a man can do just as he likes,
undetermined by any external force. To this the de-
terminist replies that as a matter of fact this freedom
is so limited by the laws which condition man's empirical
existence as to be illusory. The rej oinder from the advocates
of free will is that no external force can determine a man's
moral conduct (and with mere automatism we are not con-
cerned), unless it is presented in consciousness, and that in
being so presented it becomes a desire, or a temptation, or a
motive. In suffering himself to be determined by these the
man is not submitting to external control, but to something
which he has already made a part of himself for good or ilL
When, however, we have said that, we are faced with a
further problem. Not all that is desired is desirable, and
in being moved by my immediate desire I may be balking
myself of that ultimate satisfaction which is the real object
of all effort. If that is so, then to " do as I like " may well
be no freedom at all. There is a law of our being which
forbids satisfaction to be found along that line, as it is written,
" He gave them their desire, and sent leanness into their
souk" He, then, whose action is governed by mere desire
is not free to attain the satisfaction which alone gives
meaning to that desire. There is no breaking through
this law of our being. Every attempt to do so proves
itself in experience to be futile. Hence we are in a more
hopeless state of bondage than that which materialistic
determinism holds ; for the tyrant is established within
our own consciousness. One way, and one way only,
out of this bondage remains. If we can discover how to
make our own immediate desire, and the act of will springing
out of it, accord with the supreme law of our being, then
to "do as we like'* will no longer be to run our heads
against the stone wall of necessity which shuts us out from
the heaven of satisfaction. For we shall only " like " doing
what we " ought." This introduces a new sense of the

THE LORD THE SPIRIT 137

word "freedom." It does not now mean freedom from
restraint to follow our desires, but freedom from the tyranny
of futile desires to follow what is really good.

This is Paul's meaning. The state of slavery described
in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans is a
slavery to wrong desires ; not merely to " flesh " in the
abstract, as implying our material nature and environment,
but to the " mind of the flesh " the lower nature and
environment made a part of one's conscious self. The
slavery is the more intense because there is the Reason or
Conscience recognizing the ideal of true satisfaction, and
chafing more and more at its impotence to resist. What
the Law could not do, God has done by the gift of the
Spirit of Christ : He has given the victory to the higher
self. " Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,"
" The Law of the Spirit the law of a life in communion
with Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin
and death." Whereas life was a hopeless struggle, in which
the higher self was handicapped against a foe that had all the
advantage, it now becomes a struggle in which the handicap
is removed, and victory already secured in principle, because
God has come into the life. The Law was external j it
was a taskmaster set over against the troubled and fettered
will of man. The Spirit is within, the mind of the Spirit
is the mind of the man himself, and from within works
out a growing perfection of life which satisfies the real
longing of the soul. In the full sense freedom is still an
object of hope ; but the liberty already attained makes
possible the building up of a Christian morality

CHAPTER X!

THE DIVINE COMMONWEALTH
DISCOVERED

FROM Paul's teaching about the Spirit of Christ flows
naturally a thought in which we may find the consummation
of his work. Where many individuals share an experience
so intimate as the " partnership of the Son of God " there
must be a very intimate unity among them. Moved and
governed by the same Spirit, they are one at the deepest
levels of life. The new life in Christ, while it rests upon
a most intensely individual experience, is yet a life in which
no man is a mere individual. He is a member of Christ's
Body. We may recall that for Paul "body" meant a
real organic identity such as that which makes a man a
single self-identical individual through all the changes of
the years. Wherever Christ's Spirit is at work, there is
His body ; and He has only one body. Thus the immense
varieties of spiritual activity are only aspects of the one life,
analogous to the functions of various organs in a living
body hand, eye, ear. Each is necessary to all, and each
gets its significance only from its place in the whole. There
is one Spirit, and therefore through the whole area of the
human race there can only be one body. Here the evolu-
tion of monotheism reaches its necessary conclusion.
" There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit ; and there
are varieties of services, but the same Lord ; and there are

varieties of activities, but the same God, who is the source

138

THE COMMONWEALTH DISCOVERED 139

of all activity in us all." " There is one body and one
Spirit . . . one God and Father of all, who is above all,
and through all, and in all." 1 This drawing of the last
inference from the development of a great religious principle
is a signal contribution of Paul to social philosophy. The
Stoics had already reached a doctrine of the unity of man.
Here, as in other points, Paul stands right in the midst of
wide streams of thought. But it may be observed that the
Stoic doctrine was worked out wholly within a system of
naturalistic Pantheism, and suffered from the limitations
which such a philosophy involves. Paul's Christian doc-
trine of the unity of man has its centre in a moral self-
revelation of the one God, knitting together all men who
will accept a moral and personal relation to Him.

So much for the theory of the matter. But important as
was Paul's theoretical contribution, it was not a mere
matter of theory. It represents the actual experience of the
early days of Christianity. When a number of individuals
with varying and even dashing interests have been caught
by a revolutionary force which has made some one new
interest mean more to each than any of his previous interests,
then a new unity is inevitably created. This is what
actually happened to the early Christians. The fact of
Christ and His dealing with them became more important
to each than any other fact of his experience. The separate
interests of master and slave, man and woman, Jew and
Gentile, man of culture and barbarian, faded into nothing
before the absorbing feet which made each of these a Chris-
tian. Christ lived in each, and therefore the life of all was
one. 3 One of Paul's great words is that which is variously
translated "communion" or ** fellowship." The Greek
word is koinonia, which was originally a commercial term
implying co-partnership or common possession. Thus in

1 I Cor. rii., Rom. iii. 4-5, EpL iv, 1-16, Col. i. 18-29,
* Gal. iii. 26-28, Col. iii. u, I Cor. iii. 13.

140 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

the Gospels the sons of Zebedee and of John are said to have
been foinonai, or partners, in a kind of joint-stock company
owning fishing-boats. This word seemed to the early
Christians the most appropriate term to describe their
relations one to another. They were co-partners in a
great estate the splendid spiritual " heritage" in which
they were "joint-heirs with Christ." The ground of
their corporate life was what they called "partnership of
the Spirit" a joint-ownership in all that was most real
and vital to them all. Our liturgical phrase "the com-
munion of the Holy Ghost " curiously obscures the vividness
of the original words, as Paul passed them down to us. 3

Here, then, as Paul saw with a sudden clearness of vision^
was in actual being that holy commonwealth of God for
which the ages waited. Here was a community created not
by geographical accident or by natural heredity, not based
on conquest, or wealth, or government, but coming into
existence by the spontaneous outburst of a common life in
a multitude of persons. The free, joyous experience of
the sons of God had created a family of God, inseparably
one in Him : " one person in Christ Jesus."

This is not to say that all distinctions between men are
blurred in a dull uniformity. For the irrelevant distinctions
of class, race, and nationality, which set men in hostility,
are substituted those differentiations of function which bind
men together in a co-operative commonwealth. Paul
had much ado to induce his Greek converts, born
individualists as they were, to give full play to this unity
in difference. The Corinthians made even the varied
endowments of the Christian life matters of competition
and rivalry. They had no criterion of worth, but judged
a man's gifts solely by their "rarity value." Paul bade

3 The following passages will illustrate the significance of
KOLvuvla. : II Cor. i. 7, cf. Phil, iii. 10 and Rom. viii. 17 ; Phm. 6,
cf. 17 ; I Cor. x. 16-21 ; I Cor. i. 9, II Cor. xiii. 13 ; Phil. ii. i.

THE COMMONWEALTH DISCOVERED 141

them apply a new test : the up-building of the body. We
have seen how Paul criticized the " revival " phenomena of
the early period. This was the test by which he judged
them. " Speaking with tongues '* was of small value : it
profited no one but the individual. " Prophecy " was of
greater value : it benefited the community. The endow-
ment of the Christian was an endowment for service ; the
variety of endowments pointed to an organism with a
variety of functions. Since the endowments came from the
Lord the Spirit, it was He alone who could give meaning and
reality to the whole. It was as His Body that the whole
community functioned.4 Pursuing this line of thought,
Paul was led to see that the gifts and endowments which
are of vital importance are the moral virtues, and above
all, love, which is " the perfect link." This divine love
or charity is the subject of Paul's famous lyrical passage
in the thirteenth chapter of his First Epistle to the
Corinthians. It is the highest and most comprehensive
gift of the Spirit. " The love of God is shed abroad in our
hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us." 5

Thus the highest category of Christian ethics is deduced
by Paul directly from the experience of the indwelling
Spirit of Christ, and we may find in the fact a confirmation
of the reality of his claim to guidance by Christ's Spirit ;
for the central thing in the teaching of Jesus is His
enthronement of love to God and man as the supreme and
sufficient kw of human conduct. Paul is moving in
different regions of thought, yet emerges at the same point ;
and when he claims that in spite of the manifest differences
of the route his guide to the goal has been Christ Himself,
we must allow that his claim has reason. Love, then, is
the sum-total of moral obligation : " Be under no obligation

4 I Cor. rii. 4-1 r, 28-31, ziv. 1-5, Rom. lii. 6-8, Eph. iv.
7-16.

5 Col. iii. 14-15, Rom. v. 5, Gal. v. 6.

142 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

to anyone except the obligation of love. For love is the ful-
filment of law.'* It is a creative principle of society, the
actual force which builds and keeps in being the mystical
body of emancipated humanity, the " Israel of God." It
is the groundwork of the new " Law of Christ " or " Law
of the Spirit."*

Here we find the necessary and sufficient correction
to the individualism of Paul's ethic of the Spirit. The
sense of a supernatural intuition of God and His will,
independent of tradition or the mediation of any authority,
is apt, if taken alone, to strengthen individual self-reliance
to a morbid degree. It "puffs up," says Paul. But if
the revealing spirit is the Spirit of Christ, then also it is the
Spirit of love, and "while knowledge pufis up, love builds
up " ; builds up, not the character of the individual being
we do less than justice to Paul if we so interpret him
but builds up the commonwealth of God into an ordered
and organic whole. 7

As the initiation of the Christian life, that " immersion
in one Spirit " in which the believer died and rose again with
Christ, had its proper symbol in the rite of baptism, so also
the fellowship of the Body of Christ had its symbol in the
"Lord's Supper." From the beginning the Christian
communities had their common meal, the "breaking of
bread," and although we have not any explicit account of
the meaning which before Paul's time was attached to the
custom, yet the primitive record states that the Lord at His
last meal with His disciples broke bread, saying "This is My
body "5 and His followers can hardly have continued to
break the bread without some recollection of His words, or
without attaching some special meaning to them. For
Paul, at any rate, the breaking of the bread which Christ
had called His body was " a sharing in the Body of Christ " :

* Rom. xin. 8-10, Gal. v, 13-14, vi. 2.
7 I Cor, viii. i, cf. EpL iv. 16.

THE COMMONWEALTH DISCOVERED 143

" because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body,
for we all share in the one loaf*" 8 In order to understand
what Paul meant to say by that, we must remember how
absolutely seriously he took the thought that the life of the
Christian is the life of Christ. As the " soul," or principle
of life (psyche) animates the body of flesh, so the Spirit (of
Christ) animates the community. When bread is eaten, the
virtue of it passes into all the members of the body. So in
receiving Christ, the Body, which is the community, nourishes
all its several members and they are inseparably one in the
sharing of the common life.

There is behind this a deep mystical thought resem-
bling that of the higher mystery cults of the Greeks,
in which the sacred food of the God was eaten, and
the worshipper became one with Him. But Paul will
not let the matter rest at that quasi-magical level at
which the mere consumption of consecrated elements by
itself sufficed to work some mystic change. The reality
underlying the meal is Christ's impartation of Himself in
His Spirit to His people. But that Spirit is love. If love
be not an actual and effectual force in the gathering of
believers, then the form is utterly empty and has no value.
When at Corinth the Christians came together in a selfish
and individualist spirit, they were not eating the Lord's
Supper, but their own. There were quarrels and rivalries.
The rich feasted in luxury; the poor looked on and
hungered, and the rich despised them. Under these con-
ditions, says Paul, it was quite impossible to eat a true
a Supper of the Lord." It was useless to take the bread
and say, cc This is the Lord's Body," when you did not
" discern the Body " the unity which His Spirit creates
among those who have the love of God shed abroad in their
hearts. For the Supper was also a solemn memorial of the
dying of Christ, and of all that the dying meant It
* I Cor. i. 1 6-2 1, xi. 17-34-

144 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

reminded the partakers that they were crucified with
Christ dead to the evil passions of the unsanctified heart,
its selfishness and greed. The cup of wine was a participa-
tion in Christ's sacrifice the blood of the new covenant.
The Supper is therefore more than an ordinary community-
meal, and more also than the consuming of sacred food
which brings magical potency with it : it is the current
renewal of a union with Christ both in His death and in
His risen life, and so a repeated " crucifixion of the flesh
with the affections and lusts," and a repeated constitution
of Christ's Body in the renewal of mutual love through His
Spirit

In this Bodv of Christ Paul sees ** the ecclesia of God."

i

Ecclesia is a Greek word with a splendid history. It
was used in the old free commonwealths of Greece for the
general assembly of all free citizens, by which their common
life was governed. When political liberty went, the
name still survived in the restricted municipal self-govern-
ment which the Roman State allowed. It was taken over
by the brotherhoods and guilds which in some measure
superseded the old political associations. Among the
Jews who spoke Greek this word seemed the appropriate
one to describe the commonwealth of Israel as ruled by
God the historical Theocracy. Our translation of
it is "Church." That word, however, has undergone
such transformations of meaning that it is often doubtful
in what sense it is being used. Perhaps for ecclesia we
may use the word, simpler, more general, and certainly
nearest to its original meaning ** commonwealth." We
have spoken throughout of the Divine Commonwealth.
That phrase represents Paul's " ecclesia of God." 9 It is a
community of loving persons, who bear one another's
burdens, who seek to build up one another in love, who

9 I Cor. i. 2, i. 32, XL 22, nr. 9, II Cor. i. r, Gal. i. 13 ; c
GaL ri. 16.

THE COMMONWEALTH DISCOVERED 145

" have the same thoughts in relation to one another that
they have in their communion with Christ." 10 It is all
this because it is the living embodiment of Christ's own
Spirit. This is a high and mystical doctrine, but a doctrine
which has no meaning apart from loving fellowship in real
life. A company of people who celebrate a solemn sacra-
ment of Christ's Body and Blood, and all the time are
moved by selfish passions rivalry, competition, mutual
contempt is not for Paul a Church or Divine Common-
wealth at all, no matter how lofty their faith or how deep
their mystical experience ; for all these things may " puff
up "; love alone " builds up."

In the very act, therefore, of attaining its liberty to exist,
the Divine Commonwealth has transcended the great
divisions of men. In principle it has transcended them
all, and by seriously living out that which its association
means, it is on the way to comprehending the whole race.
Short of that its development can never stop. This is the
revealing of the sons of God for which the whole creation
is waiting.

10 Phil. ii. 5 : that this, rather than the common translation,
correctly renders the Greek original, I am convinced.

CHAPTER XII

THE LIFE OF THE DIVINE
COMMONWEALTH

PAUL, as a Pharisee, was supremely concerned with conduct,
for in Judaism not orthodoxy but correctness of conduct
was the test of a religious man. The standard of conduct
was external and confused trivialities of ritual with the
** weighter matters of the Law." But conduct was the
all-important thing. When Paul became a Christian he
did not lose his interest in practical religion. In his
greatest theological epistle the high argument reaches a
climax when with " therefore^ my brothers, I urge
you . . " he turns to show how the sum and substance
of the whole is moral holiness in practical life. 1

In the ethical teaching he gives we must think
of him as a missionary seeking to train a Christian
community in the midst of a heathen society. He
could not, and would not, do so by any attempt to
impose a rigid code governing all behaviour. His aim
was to see "Christ formed in them." He wished to
see them enter into that self-determining life of fellowship
with Christ which means emancipation of the spirit of man.
That life of fellowship with Christ means also membership
of a body. From these two principles the Spirit of Christ
in the individual, the Spirit of Christ creating the body
all morality must spring by the pure and free submission

1 Rom. li. 33-xii. 2.
146

LIFE OF DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 147

of individuals to the leading of that Spirit All that Paul
could do was to set forth by way of example the kind of
way in which such leading tended for people situated as his
correspondents were situated in the Roman world. In its
particulars his ethical teaching embodies a good deal of the
new morality which contemporary Stoicism was proclaiming,
as well as of the humaner Jewish morals of the tradition of
Jesus ben Sirach and the " Wisdom" literature. The wise
moral teacher will express the ideals he wishes to promulgate
as far as possible in terms already appreciated by his hearers*
But the unity of the whole depends upon an informing spirit
It is the character of Christ which makes it a whole. " I
urge you by virtue of the meekness and sweet-reasonable-
ness of Christ " ; " Bear one another's burdens, and so
fulfil the law of Christ " 5 " whatever you do, in act
or word, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus**:
when Paul uses such language it is more than a form
of words. a It represents a settled and reasonable con-
viction, first that where there is knowledge of good
among men it is the work of Christ the life-giving Spirit,
and secondly that now that Christ has lived the human life
we have a clear line of definition, a test for all our moral
intuitions. In the whole of Paul's moral teachings a
single and self-consistent ideal is implied, and that ideal
in the character of Jesus Christ. If we take as the vital
centre of Pauline ethics the poem of love in the thirteenth
chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, we shall
not be wrong in recognizing in it a portrait for which
Christ Himself has sat. What Paul was trying to do was
to show how a man would live if Christ were living in him,
at Corinth, at Ephesus, at Rome, in the reign of Nero.

There were certain things which he would avoid as a
matter of course : they were forbidden by the best con-
science of heathendom. Indeed, the catalogues of vices
* II Cor. x. i, Gal. vi. 2, Col. iii, 17.

148 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

which Paul gives correspond fairly closely with those of
contemporary moralists. He generally groups them broadly
into two classes : sins of the flesh, of lust and appetite, and
anti-social vices, especially the commercial vices, summed
up as "greed" or "over-reaching" pleonexia.l I say "as
a matter of course " : and such it was for Paul, but not
for his converts. We are startled to find gross unchastity at
Corinth, theft at Ephesus, drunkenness at both. The fact
is that Paul had addressed himself to an audacious enter-
prise in calling into the Church the very riff-raff of
society. If we ask how this man brought up in a
narrowly pietistic Puritan sect reached such faith in
human nature, we remember that he was a follower of
the Friend of publicans and sinners and find the answer
there. But that these evil things must go he never
doubted 5 and he assailed them in a steady confidence
that Christ had given the victory.

Over against these vices Paul does not set any merely
negative asceticism. He does not correct unchastity by
demanding monkish celibacy, or avarice by insisting on
Franciscan poverty, or drunkenness by erecting total
abstinence into a law. In the Epistle to the Colossians he
blazes out against the asceticism of certain circles as a denial
of the supremacy of Christ over all creation and of the
freedom of the Christian man. ** All things are yours;
and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's," is his broad
principle.4 His doctrine of "mortification" 5 is something
far rempvcd from that of subsequent Catholicism : it is not
the ascetic discipline which is a kind of reversed self-
pampering, but the complete dissociation of oneself from
all selfish, self-regarding, self-protecting impulses, and the

3 Rom. i. 24-32, I Cor. v. 10-11, II Cor. iii. 20, Gal. v
19-21, Col. Si. 5-8.

4 Col. ii. 16-23, I Cor. iii. 21-23, x. 23-26,

5 Col. iii. 5 sqq.

LIFE OF DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 149

readiness to accept the consequences of that dissociation in
loss, contumely, persecution or hardship to body or soul. In
his First Epistle to the Corinthians there is a passage which
affords an interesting study in the light of this. 6 Its
conclusion is perhaps the most " ascetic " passage in Paul :
and the context merits examination. The point at issue
is Paul's refusal to take money for his sen-ices. It was the
custom of wandering preachers of the Cynic, Stoic, and other
sects to receive gifts from their hearers. Jesus Christ
had sanctioned the expectation of hospitality on the part of
His followers : and Peter at least seems to have interpreted
this as including maintenance for his wife. " All quite
right and proper," says Paul ; " but I personally should
find it a hindrance. I prefer to bear my own burden.
Similarly I am prepared to yield even the liberty which
I claim for every Christian 5 I am ready to put myself
beside weak-minded persons and accept restrictions which
they consider necessary. I am prepared to give up any-
thing which interferes with the success of my mission, as
the athlete surrenders what would incapacitate him for
running, and if * brother ass, the body * 7 protests so
much the worse for brother ass ! But I am bringing brother
ass to heel : he shall not balk me in the end." If that is
asceticism, then Paul is an ascetic. He has got work to
do which must be done, and that work is his consuming
passion. As the boxer trains hard and the racer runs light,
so he will drop what hinders him from pressing towards
*ihc mark. That is different from the timid " touch not,
taste not, handle not," of the Colossian ascetics, and from
the later ecclesiastical prohibitions and restraints.

On one point, however, Paul seems untrue to himself.
A little later, we learn there were ascetics at Ephesus who

6 I Cor. ix.

7 I have ventured to make Paul speak the language of Francis :
neither, I think, would object !

150 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

taught abstention from marriage, and probably claimed
Paul's sanction. 8 If so, he had only himself to blame.9 For
himself he deemed the renunciation of family life necessary
for his mission, though he had as much right to marry as
Peter, James, and the rest. So far, so good : but when he
wished others, not engaged in mission work, to follow his
example, and suggested that marriage was a pis aller^ he
was on less safe ground. There is much to be said for Sir
William Ramsay's view that Paul was concerned in the first
instance to maintain his right to be a bachelor if his work
demanded it To the normal Jew there was something
eccentric, if not worse, about celibacy, and among the
Greeks the man who did not marry was " asking for "
scandal. Paul set out to claim that a full, pure, and
honourable life could be lived, and by some must be
lived, outside marriage. But he was carried away, as
so many people are, into proving too much. We
shall do best to hold him fast, in this matter and
on the whole question of the relations of the sexes,
to his more humane and truly Christian teaching that
while in Christ there is neither male nor female, the pure
love of man and wife is a sacrament of the divine love of
Christ, and the marriage relation which it consecrates is
indissoluble. 10

The frontal attack on evil living is not by way of ascetic
regulations, but by a steady appeal to the new life in Christ.
Thus, he writes to the Christians of Salonica : Ir

u God called us, not for an impure life, but into a life of
holiness. And so any one who neglects (this calling) neglects
not man but God who gives to us His Holy Spirit. About love
for the brotherhood, again, there is no need for me to write to

s I Tim. iv. 3. 9 I Cor. vii.

10 Gal, iii. 28, Eph. v. 21-33, I Cor. vii. xo-ii.
" I Thess. iv. 7-12.

LIFE OF DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 151

you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another ;
and indeed you act accordingly towards all the brothers in all
Macedonia. But I beg you, my brothers, to do still better (in
this direction), and to take pains to lead a quiet life, to mind your
own business, and to work with your own hands, as I told you ;
so that your conduct may be respectable in the eyes of outsiders,
and that there may be no destitution among you."

There is sound sense in these injunctions to an excitable
and unsteady people. Here and everywhere Paul impresses
us with his readiness to trust the Christian impulse and
illumination in his very fallible converts. Again and again
he echoes the appeal of Jesus, " Why do ye not even of
yourselves judge that which is right ? " And from the
same root grows as of necessity the whole new life. " The
fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, loyalty, self-control." *3

But further, the Spirit is a corporate possession and
not a merely individual. There is a "partnership of
the Spirit." That fact given full play creates from a
new centre the whole ethical life. In the twelfth
chapter of the Epistle to the Romans we see the
Christian ethic growing out of the thought of the claim
of the body upon each of its members. The Epistle to
the Ephesians supplies the fullest working out of this.^
It is interesting to survey this broad sketch of Christian
community-life and observe how at each stage there
is an appeal to the central principles of life "in
Christ." Speak the truth for we are members one of
another. Let the thief stop thieving, let him work
hard in order that he may have something to bring into
the common store. Mutual regard must take the place
of envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, "as

" Lk. xii. 57. 13 Gal. v. 22-23.

J 4 Eph, iv. 25-vi. 9. CoL iii. 5-iv. 6 goes over much the
same ground.

152 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

Christ loved you and sacrificed Himself for you." Injuries
must be blotted out by forgiveness " as God in Christ for-
gave you." " The Kingdom of Christ and God " rules
out alike unchastity and avarice or the idolatry of Mammon.
Mutual subjection is the rule. This begins in the family,
where the relation of husband and wife is a " mystery " or
sacrament of the relation of Christ and His Church. Parents
and children have mutual duties and responsibilities " in the
Lord." Slaves must give obedience "as Christ's slaves
doing the will of God," and masters must " do j ust the same "
to the slaves, because masters too are slaves of Christ
What we need to observe here is the conception of mutual
responsibility founded on an identical relation to Christ.
Paul has taken over the framework of the household as known
to Greek, Roman, and Jewish law : the housefather as
supreme lord and disposer of his wife, his children and his
slaves. But in doing so he has introduced a revolutionary
principle which was bound to transform the whole concep-
tion. In regard to slavery Christianity brought reinforce-
ments to Stoicism in the protest it was making against
that deep-rooted institution. Its attack was made from a
different side. Stoicism started in the main from the natural
unity and equality of men, and showed that slavery as an
institution was illogical. Christianity started from the slave
himself as a son of God, and so a " brother for whom
Christ died." It did not at the outset say that the institu-
tion was indefensible. It introduced a new attitude to the
slave as a man. This new attitude is well illustrated from
the letter which Paul wrote to his friend Philemon of
Colossse. He had lost a slave, Onesimus, who had run
away with money belonging to his master. By some means
Paul came in touch with the slave, and brought him to a
better mind. He induced him to return to his master,
with a letter from Paul. In this letter he wrote : " I
beg you for my son Onesimus, born to me in my prison.

LIFE OF DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 153

A * good-for-nothing ' he was once, but now he is good for
much, both to me and to you. I have sent him back to
you as though I sent you my own heart. ... It may be
that he was separated from you for a time for this reason,
that you might get him back no longer as a slave, but some-
thing better than a slave, a dear brother dear certainly
to me, and surely dearer far to you, both by natural relations
and in (communion with) the Lord." There is here
a transforming power which goes deeper even than the
splendid humanism of the Stoics. We may recall that even
Epictetus, one of the noblest of them, could dissuade a
man from punishing a slave in the words " It is better
for your slave to be bad than for you to make yourself
unhappy." *5

Passing beyond the household we have the growing
community. In pre-Roman times the Greek city-state
had formed a real community, where the individual was
conscious of having his part in the u general will." The
system had collapsed, and for all the elaborate organization
of the Empire with its local and central government there
was no real community wherein a man could find that
whole-hearted fellowship with others in common con-
cerns which is necessary to a full life. A similar
problem faces us to-day, and provokes the various
schemes of Syndicalism and the "Soviet" idea. The
result in the Roman Empire was the formation of
religious and semi-religious guilds, of which the central
government was perpetually jealous, which it tried time and
time again to cripple but never dared utterly to destroy. The
Christian Church was the biggest attempt to create a real
community within the amorphous society of the Roman
world. In large measure it succeeded, because it based
itself upon a real experience of fellowship founded upon
a free and personal relation to a " Lord " whose character
X 5 Enchiridion, zii. I.

154 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

was definite and known & personal relation which was
one of " faith " or complete confidence. We see the
conception of mutual responsibility working itself out in
the community. l6

" We urge you, brothers, give good advice to the disorderly^
console the timorous, hold the weak by the hand, and be patient
with everybody,"

Each member must have something worth bringing
into the common store. X 7

" For just as we have many organs in one body, and these organs
have not all the same function, so we, many as we are, constitute
one body in (communion with) Christ, while we are individually
organs of one another. And so, since we have different gifts,
corresponding to God's graciousness shown to us, if the gift
be inspired preaching, let us preach up to the full measure of
our conviction ; if it be administration, (let us throw ourselves)
into administration ; if it be teaching, into teaching ; if it be
the encouragement of others, into encouragement ; a man who
gives should do it open-heartedly, one who takes the lead, with
energy, one who does a kindness, with cheerfulness."

And this applies to material as well as spiritual things. The
principle is enunciated by Paul quite incidentally. During
the central portion of his career as a missionary he set on
foot a great scheme by which he hoped to promote that
unity between Jewish and Gentile Christians which was
one of his dearest aims. The Christian community in
Judaea was in great poverty, from various causes, including
famine and probably persecution. Paul projected an exten-
sive Relief Fund, to which all his communities of converts
from paganism should contribute as a mark of brotherly
love, and also as some acknowledgment of the real debt
which they owed to the first promulgators of the Christian
feith. The latter point Paul puts to the Romans in these
terms : l8

16 I Thess. v. 14. J 7 Rom. xii. 4-8. *8 R om . xv. 26-27.

LIFE OF DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 155

" Macedonia and Achaia have decided to make a * sharing-out *
{koinonla) for the poor among the Holy Community at Jerusalem.
They decided and indeed it was their bare duty ; for if the
pagans shared in " (the verb is koinonerz) " their spiritual possessions,
it is only fair that they should help the Jews with their material
possessions."

It is almost impossible to reproduce in English the play
upon the world koinonia which makes it clear tha the
" partnership " of Christians is a partnership in material
goods as well as in spiritual. Here is a basis for a far-
reaching Christian communism. Hence the motive Paul
suggests for work, which is capable of a wider
and more fruitful application. Paul, we may observe,
brought into Greek society, with its affected contempt for
the " vulgarity " of all handiwork, the healthier Jewish
tradition of respect for the craftsman. But observe the
motive : cc A man should labour with his hands, that he
may have something to give to him who has need," J 9
In other words, Work not for gain, but to enrich the
community, Mr. Bernard Shaw's dictum, " Do your
work for love and let the other people lodge and feed and
clothe you for love," is an equally good, if rough,
expression for the teaching of Paul as it is for that of
Jesus.

The interaction of the two principles of individual
autonomy and mutual responsibility is well illustrated
by Paul's dealing with some questions of casuistry which
arose out of the clash of different races and cultures in the
Church. At Corinth a difficulty arose about the eating of
food which had received a pagan consecration. The diffi-
culty could not be avoided. If you belonged to any sort
of social club or trade guild, you could not go to the mem-
bers' dinner without having food over which a pagan " grace

X 9 EpL iv. 28. ao Preface to AndrocUs and the Lion.

156 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

before meat " had been said. If you dined out with friends,
the same thing might happen. And anyhow, you never
knew but that the meat you bought at the butcher's had
done duty in some sacrifice. In the Forum of Pompeii,
indeed, the chapel of the Divine Emperor stands between
the place of slaughter and the butcher's shop. The
close connexion of sacrifice with the sale of meat is
clear. Here was a strange dilemma for a person who
believed that such a consecration brought demonic influence
into the food. The Jew, then as now, would not touch
such " unclean " meat. The conscience of the primitive
Church was equally tender about it. 31 No wonder, then,
that many at Corinth felt in the same way. But others,
inspired by Paul's teaching, said : " No, an idol is nothing
in the world 5 there is nothing in it." And they freely
and openly ate the consecrated food, to the great scandal
of the "weak-minded brother." "Everything is lawful"
was their watchword. Had not Christ " made all meats
clean " ? Paul retorts : " Everything may be lawful ; but
not everything builds up (the community). It is not every-
one who has this robust faith, and if a weaker-minded
brother follows your lead and eats, in the ineradicable
belief that he is incurring defilement, you have injured his
conscience, and you are responsible for him."" A similar
difficulty arose at Rome over Sabbath-keeping and vege-
tarianism, and Paul deals with it similarly : All days are
alike ; all foods are legitimate ; but if your faith does not

a* Acts x, 11-14. The teaching of Jesus in ML vii. 14-1;
had evidently not been assimilated. The following verses in Ml.
may represent (by a device he adopts elsewhere), under the form
of a private explanation, the process by which the early Christians
came to understand the meaning of their Master's teaching upon
this point.

33 I Cor. viii. 1-13, r. 14-31. la the opening of the dis-
cussion, the words " We know that we all have knowledge,"
and " we know that an idol is nothing in the world," are probably

LIFE OF DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 157

really rise to that height, then you must not go a step further
than your conscience allows. "That which does not
spring out of conviction is sin." And if there is a " brother "
who has scruples you must not indulge your liking till you
have won him to your way of thinking. " Do not ruin
with your eating the brother for whom Christ died." 3 3

What we have here to note is the immense value attached
to the individual conscience. No community can be
** built up," Paul says, except upon a tender and sincere
regard for the conscience of its members, even though the
conscience be mistaken or over-scrupulous. On the other
hand, the robust conscience is bound to criticize with a
candid eye the whole field of obligation and duty, unham-
pered by tabus or superstitious fears 5 moved only by the
consciousness of a relation to Christ within the conscience
which must never be desecrated, and by a perpetual sense
of responsibility towards others : " for no one lives to
himself and no one of us dies to himself."

Finally, the growing Christian community aims at
comprehending all humanity. Meanwhile, its task un-
finished, it has relations to "the outsiders." First, the
Christian has a duty to the conscience of his pagan neigh-
bours. He is bound to respect their moral standards to
the utmost of his power. " Think out conduct which shall
be honourable in the judgment of all men." 3 * But further,
the obligation to a general beneficence which love entails
is not limited by the bounds of the Christian community :
" as we have opportunity let us do good to #//, especially to
members of the family of faith." " Never return evil for
evil, but always pursue what is good both towards one another

to be taken as citations from the letter of the Corinthian church
to Paul, expressing the view of the " strong-minded " or ultra-
Pauline party. Paul accepts both statements with qualifications.

*3 Rom. xiv. T -xv. 6.

*4 Rom. zii. 17, I Cor. x, 32, I Thess. iv. 12, cf. Col. iv. 5*

158 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

and towards all." " I am debtor/' Paul said, " to Greeks and
barbarians." That debt he sums up in the same epistle as
" to love one another." 2 5 That love will inspire the most
scrupulous discharge of all social duties. The emperor
and his government come within the scope of this general
obligation, the more so because, however imperfectly,
the empire does seek to embody something of that natural
law of recompense which can only be transcended as men
enter into the higher life of love and liberty in Christ. 36 But
love will lead to something more positive than the mere
discharge of duties. For all the measure of good that there
is in paganism, there is also a power of evil, which is exerted
by way of opposition to the Christian community. This is
to be met always, not merely with non-resistance, but with
an overplus of good. " If possible, keep the peace with all,
so far as the decision lies with you. Do not seek revenge,
dear friends, but let the Nemesis of sin have its course.
. . , Do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil
with good." *7 This is surely an admirable summary
and application of the teachings on non-resistance in
the Sermon on the Mount. The outcome of it all is
that the principle of reciprocity "an eye for an eye,
and a tooth for a tooth " which in the old religion
defined the nature of the divine dealing and therefore of
moral obligation as between men, is superseded by the
new positive and creative principle of love. Because love
is the only principle upon which God deals with us, it is
the only foundation of human morality.

In all this it is implied that society as constructed on a
pagan basis must pass away. The future lies with the
new community created by the Spirit of Christ. The
future of mankind is entrusted to this community, and its
history must be the growth and consolidation of this com-

2I > Gal. vi. 10, I Thess. v. 15, Rom. i. 14, cf. xiii. 8.
** Rom. xiii. i-io. 37 Rom. jii. 14-21.

LIFE OF DIVINE COMMONWEALTH 159

munity Its members are as "luminaries in the world,
holding out the word of truth." ^8 They are " elect " for
a purpose the purpose of bringing into God's way and into
the fellowship of His Son the whole race of mankind without
distinction. In looking forward, therefore, Paul can con-
centrate attention upon the fortunes of Christ's Body.
In it he sees the promise of a true commonwealth of
man. Already within the borders of the Christian Society
the great distinctions of race, sex, culture, status, are
transcended, and the autonomous company of believers
at Ephesus or Rome is a real nucleus of the universal
commonwealth. He sees this commonwealth growing
up, built on the foundation of apostles and prophets
lives of men illuminated, inspired, and sanctified with
Christ for corner-stone ; a temple inhabited by the
Spirit of God. Or again, he sees it as a living
organism Christ the Head, every joint playing its part
in consolidating the living structure, till it grows into
perfect humanity. Then as his vision broadens he sees
this " full-grown man " made the means of the redemp-
tion of the universe which waits in hope for the revelation
of the sons of God. For God who "was in Christ
reconciling the world to Himself" has purposed in the
end "to sum up in Christ all things, in heaven and
earth." -9 That vision of a world made one and free
was the inspiration of the apostle's life-work, and it is
the word of hope he passes on to a distracted race.

*8 Phil. ii. 15-16.

3 9 EpL ii. 19-22, iv. 12-16, i. 10, c Col. i. 20 ; I Cor. xv.
25-28.

APPENDIX

A LETTER FROM PAUL THE MISSIONARY
TO THE SOCIETY OF CHRISTIANS IN
ROME

THE following abridged paraphrase of the Epistle to
the Romans aims at presenting in a plain way the con-
tinuous sequence of the argument, while suggesting the
free epistolary form of the original x :

My DEAR FELLOW-CHRISTIANS OF ROME,

Wherever I go I hear of your faith, and I thank
God for it. It is a part of my daily prayers that I may be
permitted to visit you. I believe such a visit would do you
good, and I am sure it would do me good. In fact, I have
tried again and again to get to Rome, but hitherto something
has always turned up to prevent me. I shall not feel that
my work as missionary to the Gentiles is complete until
I have preached in Rome. My mission is a universal one,
knowing no bounds of race or culture naturally, since
my message is a universal one. It is a message of God's
righteousness, revealed to men on a basis of faith (i. 1-17).
Apart from this, there is nothing to be seen in the world
of to-day but the Nemesis of sin. Take the pagan w rid:
all men have a knowledge of God by natural religion 5
but the pagan world has deliberately turned its back upon

1 First published in The Student Movement > 1919.

1 60

A LETTER FROM PAUL 161

this knowledge, and, for all its boasted philosophy, has
degraded religion into idolatry. The natural consequence
is a moral perversity horrible to contemplate (i. 18-32).

But you, my Jewish friend, need not dwell with com-
placency upon the sins of the pagan world. You are guilty
yourself. Do not mistake God's patience with His people
for indulgence. His judgments are impartial. Know-
ledge or ignorance of the Law of Moses makes no difference
here. The pagans have God's law written in their con-
science. If they obey it, well ; if not, they stand con-
demned. And as for you you call yourself a Jew and
pride yourself on the Law. But have you kept all its
precepts ? You are circumcised and so forth : that goes
for nothing ; God looks at the inner life of motive and
affection. An honest pagan is better than a bad Jew in
His sight. I do not mean to say there is no advantage in
being a Jew : [of this more presently ;] but read your Bible
and take to yourself the hard words of the prophets spoken,
remember, not to heathens, but to people who knew the
Law, just as you do. No, Jew and pagan, we are in the
same case. No one can stand right before God on the basis
of what he has actually done. Law only serves to bring
consciousness of guilt (ii. i-iii. 20).

But now, Law apart, we have a revelation of God's
righteousness [as I was saying (i. 17)]. It comes by faith,
the faith of Jesus Christ j and it comes to every one^ Jew or
Gentile, who has faith. We have all sinned, and all of us
can be made to stand right with God. That is a free gift
to us, due to His graciousness. We are emancipated in
Christ Jesus, who is God's appointed means of dealing with
sin a means operating by the devotion of His life, and by
faith on our part. It is thus that God, having passed over
sins committed in the old days when He held His hand,
demonstrates His righteousness in the world of to-day ;
i.e. it is thus that He both shows Himself righteous, and

II

162 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DA"'

makes those stand right before Him who have faith in Jesus
Christ. No room for boasting here ! No distinction of
Jew and Gentile here ! (iii. 21-31).

But what about Abraham ? you will say. Did not he
win God's graciousness by what he did I Not at all
Read your Bible, and you will find that the promise was
given to him before he was circumcised ; and the Bible
expressly says that " he had faith in God, and that counted
for righteousness," The same principle applies to us all
(chap. iv.).

[To return to the point, then.] We stand right with God
on the ground of faith, and we are at peace with Him, come
what may. God's love floods our whole being a love
shown in the fact that Christ died for us, not because we
were good people for whom anyone might die, but actually
while we were sinners. He died, not for His friends, but
for His enemies. Very well then, if while we were enemies
Christ died for us, surely He will save us now that we are
friends ! If He reconciled us to God by dying for us,
surely He will save us by living for us, and in us* There
is something to boast about ! (v. i-i i).

[Christ died and lives for us all, I say. But, you ask,
how can the life and death of one individual have conse-
quences for so many ?] You believe that we all suffer for
Adam's sin ; and if so, why should we not all profit by
Christ's righteousness ? Of course there is really no
comparison between the power of evil to propagate itself
and the power of good to win the victory, for that is a matter
of God's graciousness. However, you see my point :
one man sinned a whole race suffers for it ; one Man
lived righteously a whole race wins life by it. [But
what about Law ? you say,] Law only came in by the
way, to intensify the consciousness of guilt (v. 1 2-21).

Now I come to a difficulty. I have heard people say,
** If human sin gives play to God's graciousnessj let us go

A LETTER FROM PAUL 163

on sinning to give Him a better chance. Why not do evil
that good may come ? " (cf. iii. 8). What nonsense !
To be saved through Christ is to be a dead man so far as sin
is concerned. Think of the symbolism of Baptism. You
go down into the water : that is like being buried with
Christ. You come up out of the water : that is like rising
with Christ from the tomb. It means, therefore, a new life>
a life which comes by union with the living Christ. You
will admit that, once a man is dead, there is no more claim
against him for any wrong he may have committed. He
is like a slave set free from all claims on the part of his late
master. Think, then, of yourselves as dead. When you
remember the death of Christ, think that you i.e. your
old bad selves were crucified with Him. And when you
remember His resurrection, think of yourselves as living
with Him, a new life. And above all, bear in mind that
Christ, once risen, does not die again : and so you, living
the new life in Him, need not die again. I mean, the sin
that once dominated you need not any longer control you j
do not let it ! You 'are freed slaves ; do not sell yourselves
into slavery again. Or, if you like to put it so, you are now
slaves, not of Sin, but of Righteousness (a very crude way
of putting it, but I want to help you out). Just as once
you were the property of Sin, and all your faculties were
instruments of wrong, so now you are the property of
Righteousness, and every faculty you have must be an instru-
ment of right. Freed from sin, you are slaves of God ;
that is what I mean. The wages your old master paid
was death. Your new Master makes you a present of
life (vi. 1-23).

Or take another illustration. You know that by law
a woman is bound to her husband while he lives ;
when he is dead she is free ; she can marry again
if she likes and the law has no claim against her. So you
may think of yourselves as having been married to Sin, or

164 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

to Law. Death has now released you from that marriage
bond, [though here the illustration halts, for] it is Christ's
death that has freed you ! Well, anyhow, you are free
free, shall I say, to marry Christ. You had a numerous
progeny of evil deeds by your first marriage 5 you must
now produce an offspring of good deeds to Christ. I
mean, of course, you must serve God in Christ's spirit
(vi. i-vii. 6).

Now I admit that all this sounds as though I identified
law with sin. That is not my meaning. But surely it is
clear that the function of law is to bring consciousness of
sin j e.g. I should never have known what covetousness
was but that the law said ts Thou shalt not covet." Such
is the perversity of human nature under the dominion of
sin that the very prohibition provokes me to covet. There
was a time when I knew nothing of Law, and lived my own
life. Then Law came, sin awakened in me, and life
became death for me. Of course Law is good, but Sin
took advantage of it, to my cost. I am only flesh and blood,
and flesh and blood is prone to sin. I can see what is good,
and desire it, but I cannot practise it ; i.e. my reason
recognizes the law, and yet I break it through moral per-
versity. If you like to put it so, there is one law for my
reason, the Law of God, and another for my outward
conduct, the law of sin and death. It is like a living man
chained to a dead body. It is perfect misery. But, thank
God, the chain is broken ! The law of the Spirit of Life
which is in Christ has set me free from the law of sin and
death. Christ entered into this human nature of flesh and
blood which is under the dominion of Sin. Sin put in its
claim to be His master ; but Christ won His case ; Sin
was non-suited, its claim disallowed, and human nature
was free. The result is that all the Law stood for of
righteousness, holiness, and goodness is fulfilled in those
who live by Christ's Spirit. There are two possible forms

A LETTER FROM PAUL 165

of human life : there is the life of the lower nature of
flesh and blood, of which I have spoken ; and there is the
life of the spirit. We have Christ's Spirit, and so we can
live the life of the spirit. And in the end that Spirit will
give new life to the whole human organism (vii. 7 viii. 1 1).

You see, then, that the flesh-and-biood nature has no
claim upon us. We belong to the Spi it. Those who are
actuated by that Spirit are sons of God. [I used a while
back the expression, " slaves of God " ; but really] we are
not slaves but sons sons and heirs of God, like Christ ;
and when we come into our inheritance, how glorious
it will be ! (viii. 12-18).

This, however, is still in the future. At the present
time the whole universe is in misery, and in its misery it
waits for the revelation of God's sons. New all existence
seems futile in its transience ; and even we still share
creation's pangs. But we have hope ; and the ground
of that hope is the possession of God's Spirit in a first
instalment only, but enough to reckon upon. The fact
is that every prayer we utter yes, even an inarticulate
prayer is the utterance of the Spirit within us. We
know that all through God is working with us. His purpose
is behind the whole process, and He is on our side. If
He gave His Son we can trust Him to give us everything
else. He loves us, and nothing in the world or out of it
can separate us from His love {viii. 1839).

[That concludes the present stage of my argument ;
but before I can proceed to final deductions, I must return
to a difficulty already raised (cf. iii. 14).] If there is no
difference between Jew and Gentile, does all the great
past of Israel go for nothing ? Do all the promises of
Scripture go for nothing ? First, let me say how bitterly
I regret the exclusion of the Jewish nation as a body from
the new life. I would surrender all my Christian privileges
if I could find a way to bring them in. But we must

166 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

recognize facts ; and the first fact is that the nation as a
whole never was able to claim the promises ; from the
beginning there was a process of selection. Of the sons of
Abraham, Isaac alone was called ; of the sons of Isaac,
Jacob only. If we ask why, there is no answer save that
God is bound by no natural or historical necessity, but
intervenes according to His will. To question that will is
as absurd as for the pot to arraign the potter. Then again,
while some members of the Hebrew race have always fallen
out, always God has declared His purpose ultimately to
include others, not members of the Hebrew race and that
is just what is now happening. Now, as I said, I desire
nothing more earnestly than that the whole nation should
be saved. But the fact is that they have deliberately rejected
the chance that was offered them. There is nothing remote
or abstruse about the Christian message. It is a very simple
thing : acknowledge Jesus as Lord, and believe that He
is alive ; that is all. And they cannot say that they have
never heard the message, for Christ has His witnesses every-
where. It looks, then, as if God>had rejected His people,
as punishment for their obstinacy. I do not believe it.
God's promises cannot go for nothing. In the first place,
there has always been, and there still is, a faithful remnant
of the Jewish people. And in the second place, as for the
main body, their present rejection of the message is only a
means in God's Providence for its extension to the Gentiles.
The old olive-tree of Israel stands yet $ many of its branches
have been lopped off, and new branches of wild olive have
been engrafted in their place. But God can engraft the
lopped branches on again, if it be His will ; and I believe
it is His will, and that ni the end the whole nation will
return to Him and inherit the promises. And if the failure
of Israel has meant such blessing to the world, how much
greater blessing will its ultimate salvation bring ! God's
purpose, as I said at the beginning (cf. i. 16), is universal :

A LETTER FROM PAUL 167

He has permitted the whole of humanity, Jew and Gentile
alike, to fall under sin, only in order that He may finally
have mercy on the whole of humanity, Jew and Gentile
alike. How profound and unsearchable are His plans !
(chaps, ix. xi.).

[So now I can take up again my main Argument J If
this is the way of God's dealing with us, what ought to be
our response ? Can we do less than offer our entire selves
to God as a sacrifice of thanskgiving ? How will that
work out ? In a life lived as by members of one single
body. Let each perform his part faithfully. Let love
rule all your relations one to another, and to those outside,
even to your enemies. Do not regard the Emperor as
outside the scope of love, but obey his laws and pay his taxes.
Yes, and pay all debts to every one. Love is, in fact, the
one comprehensive debt of man to man. If you love your
neighbour as yourself, you have fulfilled the whole moral
law. But be in earnest^abput things, for the better day is
already dawning (chaps, xii.-xiii.).

I hear you have differences among yourselves about
Sabbath-keeping and vegetarianism. Take this matter,
then, as an example of what I mean by the application of
brotherly love to all conduct Remember that the Sab-
batarian and the anti-Sabbatarian, the vegetarian and the
meat-eater, are alike servants of one Master. Give each
other credit for the best motives. Do not think of yourself
alone ; think of your Christian brother, and try to put
yourself in his place. If he seems to you a weak-minded,
over-scrupulous individual, remember that in any case he
is your brother, and that Christ died for him as well as for
you, and reverence his conscience. If through your
example he should do an act which is harmless in you but
sin to him, you have injured his conscience. Is it worth
while so to imperil a soul for the sake of your liberty in such
external matters ? If the other man is weak-minded, and you

z68 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

strong-minded, all the more reason why you should help to
bear his burden. Remember, Christ did not please Him-
self. In a word, Sabbatarian and anti-Sabbatarian, Jew
and Gentile, treat one another as Christ has treated you,
and God be with you (xiv. i-xv. 13).

Well, friends, I hardly think you needed this long exhor-
tation from me. You are intelligent Christians, and well
able to give one another good advice. Still, I thought I
might venture to remind you of a few points ; for after
all, I do feel a measure of responsibility for you, as missionary
to the Gentiles. I have now accomplished my mission
as far West as the Adriatic. Now I am going to Jerusalem
to hand over the relief fund we have raised in Greece.
After that I hope to start work in the West, and I propose
to set out for Spain and take Rome on my way. Pray for
me, that my errand to Jerusalem may be successful, so
that I may be free to visit you (xv. 14-23).

I wish to introduce to you our friend Phoebe. She
renders admirable service to our congregation at Cenchraeae
Do all you can for her ; she deserves it.

Kind regards to Priscilla and Aquila, Epaenetus, Mary,
and all friends in Rome.

(P.S. Beware of folk who make mischief. Be wise ;
be gentle ; and all good be with you.)

Timothy, Lucius, Jason, Sosipater, and all friends
at Corinth send kind regards. (So do I T/rftW,
amanuensis !}

Glory be to God !

With all good wishes,

Your brother,

PAUL,
Missionary of Jesus Christ.

INDEX OF REFERENCES TO THE
PAULINE EPISTLES

ROMANS.

ROMANS (contd.)

ROMANS (contd.)

PAGE

PAGE

PAGl

Occasion of , .42

iv. 15 ... 63

viii. 3 . 58, 82, 84,

Paraphrase of .160-

iv. 16 . . , 108

88,96

168

v. i , , 108, 114

viii. 5-8. .. 60

Hi .... 43

v. 3-5 ... 40

viii. 9-ir , . 91

V. 5 141

viii, 1213 57

L 3 4 . '. *. ! 88

v. 6-8 ... 75

viii. 14-17 . , 131

i. 4 . . . * 90

v. 6 .... 64

viii. 17 . . 91, 140

i, 14 , . . . 158

v. 8-10 ... 123

viii. 18-25 * 30

i. 16-17 ... 77

v. 9 . . 63, 98, 114

viii. 20-21 . . 55

.16. . . .135

v. 10 ... 55

viii. 20 ... 58

. 17-18 . . . 39

v. I2-2I . 59, 95

viii, 21 ... 57

. 18 . . . . 63

v. 12 . . 58, 105

viii. 23 . . 57, 125

. 18-32 . 63, 77, 109

v. 13-14 . . 80

viii. 26-27 131

. 18-23 . . , 59

v. 17-19 . . 99

viii, 28-39 . . 36

. 19-21 ... 131

v. 18-19 , .110

viii. 30 . . . 114

. 19 34

V. 20 ... 80

viii. 34 ... 90

i. 24-32 ... 148

V. 21 . . 48, 58

viii. 35~39 - . 75

i. 28 .... 59

vi. i-ii . ill, 118

viii. 38 ... 58

ii. l-il ... 34

vi. 3 . . . .130

ix. .... 36

ii. 4 . . ,64, 76

vi. 5-8 ... 97

ix. i . . . .133

ii "J 63

vi. 6-7 . . .117

ix. 3 , , . , 60

ii. 8 .... 63

vi. 10 . . .96

ix. 6-29 ... 37

ii 14-15 34.56

vi. 12-23 . .117

ix. 7-13 ... 76

ii, 15 ... 109

vi. 12-14 . . 120

ix. ii ... 37

ii. 28-29 . . 71

vi. 12 , , ,58

ix. 22 . . 63, 76

iii. 1-20 ... 37

vi. 14 . . .58

ix. 22-24 64

iii. 5 .... 63

vi. 17-23 . . 58

ix. 22-23 , , 63

iii. 9-23 ... 46

vi. 19 . . . n8

ix. 27-29 . . 38

iii. 21-30 . 46, 77

vi. 22-23 . . 48

ix, 32 ... 108

iii. 22 ... 107

vi. 23 . 64, 105, 109

x .... 77

iii. 23-26 . . 99

vii. . 71-73, 80-82

xi. 1-12 ... 36

iii. 24 . . * 116

vii. 8-1 1. . . 58

4-7 37

iii. 25 . . 77,98

vii. 12. . , 66

xi. 4. ... 38

iii. 26 . . 77, 107

vii. 14 * . 60, 66

xi. 8-10 , . . 63

iii, 27 ... in

vii. 18 ... 60

xi. 11-33 . . 40

iii, 30 ... 108

vii. 20 . , .58

xi. 32 . . , 64

iv. 37, 76

vii. 22-23 . . 56

xi. 33-xii. 2 . 146

iv.3-8 ... 77

viii. 1-2 . . * 74

xiLz. . . . 98

iv.5- . .64,115

viii. 2 . . .117

xii. 2. . . 39, 135

i 7 o THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

ROMANS (contd,}

I COR. (contd.)

I COR. (contd.)

PAGE

PAGE

PAGE

xu.4-8 . . . 154

iv. 15 ... 135

XV. 21-22 . . 95

arii. 4-5 - - 9i, 139

iv. 20 ... 135

XV. 21 ... 105

xii. 68 141

xii. 14-21 . . 158

v. xo-ii. . . 148 i xv. 25-28 . . 159

xii. 17 ... 157

vi. 3. ... 58

xv. 40-50 . . 55

xii. 19 ... 63

vi. ii . 114, 118

xv. 35-54 - - 57

xiii. i-io . . 158

vi. 15 ... 91

xv. 45-49 . . 88

xiii. 1-6 . . 34

vi. 19 . . . 118

xvi. 19 . . 25, 26

xiii. i ... 134

vii . . . . 150

xiii. 4 ... 134

vii. 10-11 . . 150

xiii, 5 ... 63

viii. 1-13 . . 156

II CORINTHIANS.

xiii. 8-10 . . 142

viiu 1-3 . . . 132

xiii. 8 ... 158

viii. i ... 142

Personal traits in 28

xiii. 12-13 39

viii. 6 ... 88

i. i . . . .144

xiiL 14 . in, 130

viii. 12 ... 133

i. 5-7 98

xiv. i xv. 6. . 157

ix 14.0

i. 7 . . . . 140

adv. 9 ... 90

ix. i .... 87

i. 14 .... 39

xv. 26-27 . .155

ix. 23-27 . .114

i. 18 . . . . 107

xvi. 5 ... 26

x. i-ii . . 37, 119

i. 22 . . . . 125

acvi. 23 . . .26

x. 4 . . . 77, 88

ii- 15 39

xvi. 25-26 . . 39

x. ii ... 39

iii. 4-18 ... 77

x. 13 ... 107

iii. 5 . . . . 113

I CORINTHIANS.

x. 14-31 . . 156
x. 16-21 140, 143

iii. 12-18 . . 130
iii. 17 .88, 117,127

i. 2 . . , .144

x. 16-17 . . 91

iv. 4 . . . 39, 88

i.8 . . . -39

x. 16 ... 98

iv. 6 . . . 74, 87

i. 9 . 107, 131, 140

x. 23-26 . .148

iv. 7-11 . , . 121

i. 12 .... 51

x. 32 . 144, 157

iv. lo-ii . . 91

i. 1317 . .118

xi. i . . . . 130

iv. i6-v, 4 . . 53

i. 18-31 ... in

xi. 10 . . .58

*T. *V J. . . JJ

iv. 16 ... 56

i. 1 8 . . . 3Q 135

xi. 1734. . . 143

v. 5 , . . . 125

* * w JVf *JJ

i. 21 .... 37

*/ JT * *TO
Xi. 22 . . . 144

v. 14-15 . 75* 97

i. 24 . . . 86, 135

xi. 25 . . .98

v. 16-17 * 9 2

i. 26 . . . . 26

xi. 27 . . .98

v. 17 ... 135

i. 30 . 86, 116, 118

xii-xiv . . . 125

v. 18-19 75

ii .... 132

xii .... 139

V. 21 . . . . 96

ii. 6-8 ... 39

xii. 4-11. . . 141

vi. 2 . . . . 39

ii. 8 . . . .58

xii. 6. . , .113

viii. 9 ... 88

ii. i2-iii. 3 . . 57

xii. 8. . . . 132

x. i . . * . 147

ii. 15 ... 133

xii. 12-27 . .91

x. 2-4 ... 60

ii. 16 . . 128

xii. 12-14 4 6

x. 3-6 ... 132

in. 7 . . . . in

xii. 13 . 130, 139

xi. 23-28 . . 25

iii. ii . . .91

xii. 28-31 . . 141

xi. 26 . . .52

Hi. 13 ... 39

xiii . . 141, 147

xii. 1-9 . . 87, 128

iii. 16-17 . . 118

xiii. 2 ... 107

xii. 7-9 ... 25

iii. 21-23 J 4 8

xiii. 12 ... 132

xii. 7. . . .58

iii. 23 . . .91

xiv. 1-5 , . .141

xii. 9-io. . . 135

iv. 3-5 . . . 133

xv. 4-8 . . , 87

xii. 10 . . . 40

iv. 3 * 134

xv. 9. . . 23, 144

xii. 20 ... 148

iv. 7 . . . , in

xv. 12-28 . . 91

xiii. 3-4 . . . 135

iv. 9-13 ... 25

xv. 20-28 . . 40

xiii. 13 ... 140

INDEX OF REFERENCES

171

GALATIANS.

GALATIANS (contd.}

EPHESIANS (contd,)

PAGE

PAGE

Personal traits in 28

v. 15 ... 55

PAGE

iv. 7-16 ... 141

1.4 -... 39

v. 17 ... 57

iv. 12-16 . 89, 159

i. 6-9 ... 52

v. 19-21 . 6o f 148

iv. 16 . . . 142

i, 8 . . . .58

v. 22-23 -125,151

iv. 18 ... 56

i. 12 . . . . 128

v, 23 ... 117

iv. 24 ... 135

i. 13 - . . 23. 144

v. 24 ... in

iv. 25-vi. 9 , .151

i. 14 . . . . 22

vi. 2 . , . 142, 147

iv. 28 ... 155

L 15-16 . . 23, 87

vi. 7 .65, 109

v. 1-2 ... 75

"-I5- - - 36, 37

vi. 8 . . 48, 60, 125

v. 6 . . . .63

ii. i-io . . 23, 51

vi. 10 . . . 158

v. 21-23 - 150

ii. 11-14 * 5i

vi. 12-16 . . 52

vi. 12 . , 35, 58

ii. 16 . 107, 108

vi. 14 ,74,108, 120

vi. 18 ... 131

ii. 19-20 . 74, 87

vi. 16 . . 4 144

ii. 19 . . 74, 108

PHILIPPIANS.

ii. 20 ... 130

EPHESIANS.

Time and place

iii. 1-5 ... 52

of . , . .29

iii. i . . . . 108

Character, time,

Personal traits in 28

iii. 6-iS ... 37

and place of . 8, 29

i. 6 . . . .39

iii. 7-22 ... 76

i. 3-ii. 23 . . 41

i- 9-io ... 133

iii. 7-9 ... 37

i. 3-14 ... 36

i. 10 .... 39

iii. 10-11 . . 71

i- 4-7 ... 75

i. 21 . . . . 130

iii. H-I2 . . 77

i- 5 .... 37

ii. I . . . .140

iii. 13 ... 101

i. 7 - .98, 116

ii. 5 . * . .145

iii. i5-iv. 7 . .80

i 9 .... 37

ii. 6-8 ... 88

iii. 16-17 36

i ro . . .91, 159

ii. o-ii ... 90

iii. 19 - . . 36, 80

i 14 . . 116, 125

ii. lo-n . . 41

iii. 22 ... 107

i 15 * .107

ii. 12-13 . .115

iii. 23-24 . . 38

i. 17 - . * . 132

ii. 13 - . 37* 113

iii. 24 ... 108

i. 19-20 . . .113

ii. 15-16 . 39, 159

iii. 26-28 . 46, 139

i. 20-23 ... 90

iii. 3-9 ... 46

iii. 26 . . . 107

i. 23 .... 91

iii. 5 . . . . 22

iii. 27 ... 130

ii. 2 .... 39

iii. 7-n ... 120

iii. 28 . . 91, 150

ii. 3 ... 60, 63

iii. 9 - 107, in

iv. 1-7 . . . 117

ii. 4-10 ... 75

iii. 10 . . 40, 140

iv. 1-3 ... 38

ii. 5-7 ... 91

iii. 12-14 - -114

iv. 3 35, 58

ii. 8 . . . .108

iii. 15-16 . . 134

iv. 4-5 36,84

ii. 9 - . . .in

iii. 20 ... 48

iv. 4 . . . , 88

ii. 10 . is c

iv. 7 . cfi

iv. 6-7 ... 131

. ... i$3

". 13 ... 98

iv. 13 . . 74, 135

iv- 9 - - 35, 58, 132

ii. 14 ... 55

V. 22 ... 26

IV. 12-20 . . 52

ii. 15-22 . . 91

iv. 13 . . 25, 60

ii. 19-22 . 46, 159

COLOSSIANS.

iv. 19 ... 130

ii. 21 ... 118

Time and place

iv. 21-31 . 49, 76,

iii. 1-12 ... 39

of . . . .29

117

iii. 12 . 107, 108

i. 4 -107

V. I-I2 ... 52

iii. 14-19 . 91, 135

i. 13-19 ... 88

V. I . . . . 117

iii. 17 108 x^o

1 T 3 T C t*

v. 5 . . . ,114

iii. 1819 . . 75

*. 13 15 ... 75
i. 14 * 116

v. 6 . . . . 141

iii. 20-21 . .113

i. 17-29 ... 41

v. 13-14 . . 142

iv. 1-16 ... 139

i. 18-29 . * 139

v. 13 ... 60

iv. 4-16 . . 46, 91.

L 18-20 ... 90

1 72 THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TO-DAY

COLOSS. (contd.)

PAGE

L 18 . . . . gz
i. 19 ... 37* 90
i 20 08 159

COLOSS. (contd.)

PAGE

iiu 9-u . . 46, 91,
iii, 135
iii, TO ii . 41

I THESS. (contd.)

PAGE

iv. 13-v. ii . 40, 91
v. 4-8 ... 39

i. 21 56

iii. IT . . i3Q

V. Q . . . 6^

i. 22 . . . . 60

i. 24 . 40, 74, 91, 98
i. 25-29 ... 39
L 27 . . .91, 125
L 29 . . . . 113
ii. 2-3 ... 132
ii. 5 . . * . 107
ii. 8 . . * 35,58

iii. 14-15 . 141
iii. 15 . 91
iii. 17 . . 147
iv. 5 . . . . 157
iv. 15 ... 26

I THESSALONIANS.

v. 14 ... 154
v. 15. . . 158
v. 24 ... 107

II. THESSALONIANS.

i. 10 .... 39
ii. i-io ... 40
ii. 2 . . . . 30

ii. 9 . . . .90
ii. 10-13 . . 118
ii. 13 ... 60
ii. 16-23 . . 148
ii. 18 56, 58, 60
ii. 19 . . 41, 91
& 20 . . 35, 58
iii 14 . . T^T

i. 5 -132
i. 6 . . . 130
L 8 . . 107
L 10 . . .63

ii. 13 . U3
ii. 15-16 . 50
ii. 16 . 39> 63
iii. ^ . . AO

ii. 6-7 ... 34

PHILEMON.

Occasion and
subject of . 29,
152-3

2 ..... 26

iii 5 iv 6 151

iv. 37 . .118

6 . . . . . 140

iii. 5-9 . . .148
iii 6 * ... 63

iv. 7-12 . . 150
iv. 12 157

8-16 .... 26
17 140